Everything Where it Belongs
by dynamicsymmetry
Summary: It's been months since Grady, and Beth is haunted by the spectre of Daryl shot dead right before her eyes. But he isn't quite as dead as he was supposed to be. And she's not sure which is worse. - Bethyl, unremitting horror and misery.
1. all the living and the dead

**Author Note:** This happened because I wanted to write something fucked up. It's been a while. You may therefore, if you wish, consider this almost a Safe Up Here With You redux, though more tentative in some ways and potentially a good bit weirder.

If you read _Safe Up Here With You,_ pretty much all the same warnings apply - violence, disturbing hallucinations, self-harm, suicidal stuff, potential sexual fucked-up-ness. I expect this to get disturbing. I'll be trying to _make_ it disturbing. It'll also probably get problematic - I'm letting my id out to play a bit. So proceed at your own risk is what I'm saying.

For anyone who cares at all about "feel" influences, there are two major ones at work here: a lot of stuff by Nine Inch Nails, from which the title and probably a lot of the chapter titles will be drawn, and the art of Zdzisław Beksiński. As I write this my final night in Poland is drawing to a close, and today I spent a good bit of time in the Beksiński exhibit in the historical museum in Sanok, which I really recommend you visit if you're ever in this part of the world.

As always, thank you for reading. I'm beginning this during a tough writing period, so it means a lot.

* * *

 **Chapter 1: all the living and the dead**

It's a cloudy gray twilight in early summer when they bring him in.

At first she thinks she's having a nightmare. Another one. Another one in a series which has proven itself regular and reliable and so far devoid of any hint of an ending. He's always in them - she has no nightmares anymore where he doesn't feature, as if that's the one place in which he survives. Where she keeps him alive as an instrument of torture, no matter how many times everyone has told her that what happened wasn't her fault.

She knows better.

He's always in her nightmares and it's always of those final moments, though sometimes the details change. Sometimes when he shoves her out of the way the bullet goes through his neck, jets blood against the bland hospital walls. Sometimes it goes through his heart. Hits him in the gut. Sometimes he takes a long time to die, and he sprawls there on the floor in an expanding pool of the blood that should have been hers, and when he stares silently up at her she can see that he's so scared and in so much pain and she can't help him.

And sometimes he hates her. He mouths it, even if he can't speak. It's her fault. He hates her. She killed him.

Sometimes the gun is in her hand.

Sometimes it's just the scissors.

Sometimes it's so much worse than that.

But it's never like this, and she drops the crate of canned beans she's carrying and doesn't feel it when the corner of it smashes into her left big toe - where later the nail will be a horrifying bruised black. It's never like this: He never walks in through the gates, glancing around through the wild tangle of his hair, every movement sharp and furtive. He's never led in by Rick and Aaron - Rick walking like a man who's just taken a shovel to the head, clearly stunned, not far from staggering. He's never filthy and spattered with blood and dressed in what look like the ragged remains of four or five separate sets of clothes, and he's never gripping an equally filthy machete, caked in walker guts and gore - and somehow that's the worst, somehow that's one of the worst things her traitor mind has ever hurled at her, because he looks so _wrong_ that way.

That's not how he fights. That's not him.

But it's just a dream.

Except then people are stumbling past her - Maggie and Glenn, their own crates abandoned, and she catches glimpses of their disbelieving faces before they're well past her and closing in on a man only she should be able to see. She turns her numb head - numb face, numb mouth and eyes, her whole fucking body as useless and stupid as it was that day - and there's Carol, Carol with Judith on her hip, and it's been a while since Carol appeared to have much going on beneath her mask other than cold reptilian calculation but now Carol's face is twisted with the tears breaking through that mask, like part of her was almost dead too and is only now stirring and beating its way out of some internal coffin.

They put him in the trunk. They put him in the fucking trunk. Now he's here. _He shouldn't be._

 _To be_ is the operative verb here. And he is.

He's not a nightmare. He _is._

Without meaning to, she's following them. That makes sense; she can't imagine a scenario, waking or dreamed, where she wouldn't. She's following and limping for some reason that escapes her, staring as they gather around him, as they reach for him, as he jerks himself backward with a violence that somehow surprises her not at all. As Rick darts between them and him and holds up his hands, shakes his head, is saying something she can't make out, because she can't hear anything over the ringing in her ears.

In her nightmares he's never edging backward with his center of balance spread low, coiled like an animal, his grip on the machete tense enough to see from yards away. In her nightmares his teeth are never bared like something enraged and feral and terrified.

In her nightmares he's always dying. In her nightmares Daryl Dixon is never alive.

He finally catches sight of her when she's nearly reached him, and he freezes. Goes rigid. Shaking at his edges. Every muscle in him wound so tight it might snap.

That taut line from her to him. Reeling them in. And then she sees the way he's looking at her and all at once she wants to run.

Should. She should run. She froze when he did, she's shaking like he is, and he has his machete and with all the inevitability of every nightmare she's ever had his eyes sink to her belt and what she's carrying there.

What she's carried since they left him. Too big for her, really, but she carried it. Because it was what she _could_ carry. And if sometimes she particularly felt the weight of it, that only seemed fair. That only seemed right.

His focus settles on the knife and everything wound so tight in him breaks. She almost hears it - _hears,_ when nothing else is reaching her. The snap of something both thick and horribly brittle.

Rick is still talking. More people gathering around them all, dim and faceless. Rick is saying something upsetting - just in front and to Daryl's side, mostly a blur in the periphery of her vision but clear enough that she can read his expression. Rick is upset, and as Carol takes a step back - nearly stumbles, keeping hold of Judith but clutching briefly at Rick's arm - whatever he's saying is clearly upsetting the rest of them as well. But she doesn't need to understand. She understands nothing, doesn't imagine she can or ever will at this point, because Daryl Dixon is alive and standing in front of her and not a nightmare, but he's a _wraith,_ eyes glowing pale coals as he _lunges_ at her, mouth gaping in a wordless scream that pierces the gunshot-whine in her ears and shatters the inside of her skull like a bullet.

She should run. She doesn't. She stands there and she waits for him to reach her. She has no idea what will happen when he does.

She's not sure it matters.

Someone else yelling. Shouts of alarm. A rush of bodies and Rick tackles him and takes him down, Carol joining him with Judith no longer riding her hip. Rick is kneeling on his back, twisting his arm. He hasn't stopped screaming and he hasn't stopped staring at her, searing her with those haunted, hunted eyes. The machete has skittered out of the reach of his clawing fingers and his nails are splintering and bleeding on the pavement, but he's not trying to get the machete.

He's trying to get to her.

 _I hate you,_ he mouths in her nightmares. He gazes up at her in his swelling halo of blood, neat little hole in his brow, and even if the bullet took his voice away, he makes sure his words reach her. They're riding that cold, flat, _dead_ gaze.

 _You fucking killed me, you stupid useless bitch. Look at this. Look at what you did. Because this is what happens when stupid useless weak little bitches latch onto strong people like parasites._

 _You killed me. You killed me and I hate you._

He's not mouthing that. He's not mouthing anything. He has no words. Just that awful scream, now subsiding into a wretched kind of sobbing as his head sags and his hands go limp. Very suddenly. Like he's been shot.

Then she can't see anything for her tears, and she's falling to her knees - bare knees, skinning them instantly. So they're both bleeding now, damaged by the ground.

No one is looking at her. Not even him. Not anymore. That's probably a good thing.

She rocks forward and covers her mouth with both hands, and when she closes her eyes the bloodless twilight turns a deep, rich red.

In her nightmares it's never like this.

This is worse.


	2. while you're hiding in the trees

**Chapter 2: while you're hiding in the trees**

She's the first thing he remembers.

First and last thing. All the middle parts, too. Almost everything is her face, one way or the other. Her face in the firelight and her fucking voice, always fucking singing in his head, singing him to sleep in a dead man's bed, pouring in through the hole where everything poured out.

She won't leave him alone.

In the dark, at night, out there. Alone, which he never wanted to be. Making his own fires. Her face in the flames. Her voice.

He didn't mean it. _Never leave him alone, never. Please._

 _Please, not again._

* * *

Anyway, first and last thing. Yes. Because then there was her in that fucking hallway, _Jesus,_ that hallway where he still is a lot of the time, and he knew something was wrong and he went for her, through the air _fast_ like a bolt, like a bullet, like the one in his head where hers should have been. Golden blur of her hair - that's another thing he had and has and keeps, because that was also in the fire. That night.

 _Oh._

(He's so fucking stupid. Shit, he is literally too stupid to live.)

Blur of her hair and her voice screaming, and the world broke his head open and he was falling. Then everything was red, and moving, and more screaming and her voice again and the darkness. For a while. A long time.

Maybe.

Then waking up. Remembering her. Light, gold, fire. Warmth and touching. But she wasn't there. So this doesn't really count, because all the parts where she isn't there are less real somehow. They don't hold together as well. He doesn't trust them. They fade in and out and cracks run through them. He doesn't want to put weight on them. He can put weight on her. She's strong. She's a constant. She's an island and he's water lapping around her shore. She's an island and he beaches himself on her. She's an island and he can't find her, and the storm blows a hole through him and he sinks into the breathless dark.

(He's also very easily distracted these days.)

But Edwards explained everything and it made sense. He guesses. So far as it goes. His head was hurting a hell of a lot basically all the time, but he got the gist of it. He understood the important parts. Edwards was very helpful. Nervous little fucking weasel of a man. Eyes darting everywhere every time he was in the room. Never actually looking all that long. Never holding a gaze. Didn't like that very much.

Edwards got to keep one of those eyes. It was a way of saying thank you. Figured he should do something like that, when it was time to leave.

He remembers her. Always has. Other people, yes. Clearer now and then. Sometimes even names. Though a lot of the time her name escapes him too - the one thing about her that he has a lot of trouble holding onto. But names are slippery things. At times his own doesn't seem especially trustworthy.

Mouthing names into the flames, silent in the dark except for the hiss and crackle of the fire. _Rick. Carol. Michonne. Maggie. Glenn. The Boy and the Baby_ \- he never managed to get those back. _Tyreese and Sasha._ Girl who was with the Governor and who for some reason they didn't kill. That military asshole and the other girl with him in those ridiculous shorts. Nerdy fuck with that greasy mullet. The useless fucking priest.

(He had a brother, maybe, but that part is barely a whisper anymore and it never strikes him as all that significant the few times it comes up and also he's pretty sure it might hurt if he let it so he leaves it be.)

The piece of shit she almost died for.

Doesn't deserve a name.

But hers. Oh, hers. Remember. God, please remember, but he can't and there's only the light and the fire and her hair and her voice and _oh,_ delicate little fingers curled through his and the weight of her in his arms, soft and warm, Jesus fucking _Christ_ she felt so damn good.

He didn't get it.

So much he doesn't understand. More now.

(He never did understand very much.)

There's a hole in his head and he can't keep anything in.

Their names in the dark. The trees bleed out and burn away and it's all flat dry land, fires in the distance. Eyes burning smoke; he squeezes them shut. There's a place he's going, and in the distance it rises like a black tower. But it never gets closer. He thinks _I shouldn't even be here_ and he thinks _faith gets you fucking killed_ and he thinks _but there's nothing else now and anyway was she really wrong about everything?_ And he looks out at the herds of the dead moving like buffalo across the plains and he thinks _maybe this is just a huge goddamn waste of time_ because _I don't think the good ones survive_ but _she's tough and she saved herself._

Right?

He stares at the fire until his vision is scorched away. Her song is the shriek of a banshee in his ears.

* * *

The herds are real. So he rolls like a dog in their torn entrails, covers himself in blood and rotting fat and jellied brain and walks among them, unafraid, because very little separates him from them now and it's not just about physical proximity and it's sure as fuck not just about smell. Edwards said he survived, called it _miraculous,_ but does that sound right? Does he feel like a miracle?

(He is not and never will be like her.)

He's walking around. So are they. Why the hell should he feel like being ambulatory makes him so special? He eats - yeah, well. Thinking? Maybe. That's sort of an open question. Actual thinking, the kind people do.

But he can track. They can't. That's something.

So he does, carrying her memory. Carrying the sometimes-names. In his hands like fire, like coals that sear him to the bone, melting him like wax, but what else is he supposed to do? Lie down? Lie down and die like he should have had the sense to do? So maybe _that's_ what he's too stupid for. Who the fuck knows anymore.

Ran into three men, coarse in voice and appearance. Watched them long enough to be certain that they weren't likable. Came out of the night and killed them with his hands and his teeth and took the machete. Not ideal but he didn't like their guns any more than he liked them.

So: Northward. Sun rises and sets in all directions now so it's not available to him for the purposes of navigation but he has magnetic north and supposedly the shot was a clean entry-exit deal but he can feel her pulling at shards of metal in his skull. In his brain.

Doesn't matter, lead or steel shavings. His entire body conducts.

Plus her trail looks like a river of burning blood. That helps a lot.

* * *

First thing he remembers. Last thing.

Before that, on the highway by the pile-up and the truck on its side, hauling the walkers off the man - _Rick, right, yes_ \- and the other man pinned down, cutting them to pieces. Easy. He's done it a hundred thousand times. He's never stopped. Does it in his sleep. Hauling them off and standing in the stinking wreckage and _knowing_ him - ignoring the other one, if he's not a problem he isn't worth paying attention to and if he's a problem it won't be much of a big fucking deal to cut him to pieces as well - knowing him and finding the name and from there hopping from stone to stone in the bloody river he's followed upstream for six hundred miles and making landfall on the island that is her.

All right, sure, he'll go with them.

 _Is Beth there._

Yes. As it turns out, she is.


	3. are you sure what side you're on

**Chapter 3: are you sure what side you're on**

Later she's not sure what happened after that.

What she knows is that she opened her eyes and she was still on her knees, and Maggie was crouched in front of her, taking her hands and saying something that Beth couldn't understand. That didn't sound like words at all. She was trying, she was, but she stared at her sister and she blinked and breathed and did the things she knows living people do - _he did them, he's doing them now, she saw him doing them while he was screaming and trying to rip the world apart to get to her_ \- and she thought about how it was very much like that day, like the moments after she saw him go down and the world cracked in half, into _before_ and _after,_ like stepping through a broken mirror.

She experienced those moments out of order. Her sense of temporal coherence shattered. He fell and she stared at him and only _then_ did she see the back of his skull exploding blood, head snapped back, and she tasted copper on her lips and knew where it came from, and she was kneeling beside him and fumbling at him and getting his blood on her hands, covering himself in him. Painting.

Dawn died next. She didn't see Rick fire the shot. She didn't see Rick stagger, almost fall. She knew it happened because nothing else could have gone that way.

On her knees, his head in her hands. In her lap. In his brow it was so neat. Little hole, very little blood. Just a trickle. It was the back that was the mess, soaking his hair, her jeans. Her shirt. Yellow and red. Her hands slippery, trying to hold on. Trying to cradle him. Thinking how she was supposed to pick _him_ up now, she was supposed to carry _him._ Because he couldn't move fast enough. He couldn't walk at all. They had to go so he was going to have to walk, but he wasn't getting up, so someone had to do something, and she looked up and there was Dawn in her own spreading pool of blood, her blank eyes staring up at nothing, those fucking scissors still protruding from the meat of her shoulder.

If he hadn't pushed her aside, she might have hit where she was aiming. The bitch's carotid artery. Might have taken her down. Rick might not have had to do anything.

She got angry. She got stupid. She almost got them all killed. In a moment he would be sitting up and giving her shit for it, gripping her by the shoulders and shaking her, demanding to know what the fuck she was _thinking_ , didn't she realize what could have happened, didn't she get how bad it could have been. Shaking her with blood trickling down his face - _Beth, Jesus fuckin' Christ -_ pointing to the hole in his forehead, _you stupid fuckin' idiot, look at this, ain't you got any damn sense._

He could call her any names he wanted.

It happened all out of order. They put him in the trunk and then they got him down the stairs - Tyreese and Rick, and Rick staggering again, shaking, half blind with his tears. And before that the herd came and they had to run, and he didn't even get a funeral, _don't you think that's beautiful,_ he was a person and he should have gotten a funeral and flowers, she should have been able to sing him something, sing him to sleep like she did before, but she saw him one last time before they slammed the lid down, thinking it wasn't a comfy bed at all, imagining his corpse bloating in the heat, maggots churning in his eyes, because he wouldn't get eaten, no, he would just _rot_ in there and fall apart and be a pile of reeking semi-liquified flesh staining the dirty mat.

She threw up all over her boots and they dragged her away.

Then she was holding his knife and crying on her knees in the grass, and no one was talking to her.

So all that happened. In some order. It's all just pieces.

Someday she'll sort it out.

In the meantime Maggie is talking very earnestly to her and Beth is nodding. Okay, sure. Whatever. Allowing herself to be pulled to her feet, led back to the house and put on the couch. Given tea. A blanket even though she's not cold. Denise has a pill for her to take, which she takes. The world flattens out and draws away from her. Good. She wants nothing to do with it now.

She sleeps for a while.

* * *

She actually sleeps through the night. She knows, because when she closed her eyes the sun was almost gone and when she opens them it's streaming in through her bedroom window, washing her in itself, so bright and cheerful and she wants to shoot a hole in it and let the darkness bleed through.

She lies on her back and stares at the ceiling. It's pristine. Like everything else in the Zone, it's shiny and new and very nearly perfect in a way she should like. Should want. Should be a relief after the hell they crawled through. More than one; hell after hell after hell. Different levels defined by different methods of torture; over a month ago on her first night here, all scrubbed clean in a soft bed in a house everyone kept telling them was safe, she looked back and that was what she saw.

She made it bearable. She did what she had to do in order to stay human. Then to keep _him_ human. More than surviving. Keeping them alive.

But it's been a while since she really saw the point.

Now she has no fucking idea what she'll do.

She'll get up. She feels surprisingly functional, like she hasn't been flattened by one of those high-speed Japanese trains. Like she really _can_ pretend that it was all a nightmare. She can go to the bathroom and shower, she can brush her teeth, she can wrestle her hair into some kind of submission, and she can put on clothes, and she can go downstairs where Maggie is sitting on a stool at the kitchen island with a mug of coffee and staring at nothing.

It's still early. Glenn must have had a thing.

Maggie looks up. Her face is doing something that suggests she's remembering to be startled. "Beth. I- Hi."

She should say it back. She should keep up this level of nicety. This is her _sister,_ this is someone who loved her when she was utterly unlovable, who took care of her in that week after when she was almost incapable of taking care of herself. Like at the farm, only this time she could walk around and even run when she had to, but that was about it. Didn't talk. Didn't eat. Didn't wash herself. Didn't sleep, not exactly. Now her sister is sitting here and Beth knows without having to be told that Maggie is here _because_ of her, here so someone would be here when she woke up and came downstairs and had to contend with the world as it now seems to be. Maggie is here because she didn't want Beth to have to do that alone.

She should be grateful and say hi. Nod. Something.

"Where is he?"

That's… It might do. It's not _good,_ but it's speech and it's coherent.

Maggie sighs and rakes a hand through her hair. Getting long. Beth isn't sure what she thinks of it. "Can you sit down?"

"Can you tell me where he is?"

"Beth, please." Not actual pleading. But close, in a passively tired way. Because this is something they both know, a familiar mode. A relapse that both of them recognize and both of them hate. "Just… Just sit down and we'll talk about it."

"Why do we need to talk about it?"

She's shooting the questions. She's returning fire. They're not sharp, not loud; there isn't any force to speak of behind any of it. But they're relentless, and she doesn't entirely have control, and she listens to herself with all the weariness Maggie must be feeling.

Inside her head, her own machine gun rattle. _He'salivehe'salivehe'salive._

"Because he's locked up in the cell."

Beth sits down.

"I guess you didn't… You didn't see it." Maggie is speaking slowly, deliberately. Facing her, mug abandoned on the counter and her hands folded on her knees. The kitchen is all white and chrome and everything gleams. It's like a fucking spaceship. "They got him on his feet and down the street, just trying to get him calm, and he attacked two people. Got to them before Rick could stop him. Rick's trying to talk to Deanna about it, but for the time bein'... Yeah."

This is completely unsurprising. She looks at Maggie's folded hands, the scar on the knuckle of her right thumb, a nail chewed ragged and the red raw edge of a torn cuticle. A couple of them. It's an old habit Maggie had through high school and mostly kicked long before the world fell apart, but a lot of things seem to be getting a return.

"Are they okay?"

"Pretty much." Maggie pauses and Beth waits for something else that will totally fail to surprise her. "He wasn't… It wasn't like…" She takes a breath. Air for an anchorpoint. "He was scratching 'em. Biting 'em. Rick and Michonne took him down."

Next on the list. "Is he okay?"

Maggie looks at her. Beth studies her, her eyes and the set of her jaw, her shoulders, her jittery left knee: Maggie wants to run. Maggie wants to bolt like a frightened deer.

"No. He's not."

* * *

Michonne is already shaking her head when Beth is still yards away. By the time she gets there, gestures have made the transition into words. More things entirely expected. Beth stands, swallows, turns on her own urge to run and pummels it down.

"You're not going in there."

"I have to see him."

Michonne pushes off the wall on which she's been leaning, arms folded across her chest. "You forget what happened when he saw you yesterday?"

"No." She manages to keep her voice steady. She's proud of that. She's not weak. She made it this far and she's not weak. "You're not gonna keep me out. We both know that. So get outta the way."

"I get out of the way, you go in there, and I have to explain to your _sister_ why you're bleeding in the clinic." Michonne leans in, every syllable clipped, and in between each of them is what she's kind enough not to say. _Best case scenario._ "You saw him the once, Beth. You didn't see him after. You do not. Want. To go in there."

A long pause. Beth allows it to play out. When it comes right down to it, it's not like there's any deadline here but the one she's setting. Daryl isn't going anywhere. It's still early and she isn't scheduled for a shift on the wall until the afternoon. She slides her gaze across Michonne's features, and as she does she sees a hard mask begin to crack. Softness seeping through.

"You don't want to see him like this. Beth… Trust me. Not like this." Lower. Softer. "He's not who you remember. I know, that's obvious, but he's _not._ "

But she already saw him in the worst way she can imagine. She saw his head blow open, splatter blood everywhere. She saw him crumpled on the floor. She saw him boneless and empty. She saw him _gone_ in the deepest way possible. No going back from it.

Her hands are fists and the fists are shaking. She saw him locked in.

All the ways someone can be _locked in._

"I need to see him," she whispers. She uncurls a hand and takes the hem of her shirt, lifts it - but she doesn't need to. His knife is far too big to conceal. It hangs on her belt like a shackle. This isn't about making Michonne aware of its presence. "I'll use it. If I have to."

Michonne closes her eyes, ducks her head, exhales long and heavy - and Beth knows she's won.

But she knew she would. Because if this has any of the qualities of a nightmare - regardless of whether or not she's awake - one of them is inevitability. Things will happen because they have to happen. Things will happen because they couldn't have gone any other way.

She's not sure nightmares end.

"Alright." Michonne stands aside, goes into her pocket for the key. "I already know you don't want me coming in with you. Fine. I'm not interested in having that fight." She sighs again and passes a hand down her face. "I'll be right out here. If anything happens, if-" Beth is moving past her and she turns, grips Beth's shoulder, nearly jerks her backward with the force of it. "If _anything_ happens, you scream. I don't care what it is. You do it."

Beth nods. "I will."

They both know she's lying.

* * *

It's dim.

There's a single window and it has a curtain, and the curtain is drawn. It's not a big room: smaller than her bedroom, though not by much, and furnished with a cot and a chair. It's devoid of color anyway - it's not like she's intimately familiar with the space but she's seen it once before now - but in the light strained through the curtain's fabric it's utterly monochrome. Sepia. She's standing in an antique photo.

Looking at the thing in the corner.

He's sitting with his knees drawn up against his chest, his arms folded over them - he's found the deepest available patch of shadow and at first it's difficult to tell, difficult to see him as more than a dark shape against a lighter background. She remembers that from yesterday too, though only now is she really aware of it: he was _dark,_ is dark, and she doesn't think it's just dirt and old blood. His tangled hair. His crazed eyes. They used to be blue. Now she'd swear they're oil-black.

But she can't tell. It's too dim. And she can't see his eyes at all.

She can't see most of his face, if it comes to that.

She stands in front of the closed door. Doesn't move. He doesn't move. But he's awake and he's looking at her - she feels his eyes boring holes in her, and she knows this was an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Not to be here at all. But to be in here alone with him. She's not sure what's going to happen. It's not that he might hurt her. Sure, apparently he might; that isn't really something she's concerned with. But this is an unmoored space in time, where everything has simultaneously circled back and flung itself forward, a Möbius strip turning and turning forever, and such a space can't be trusted.

The room could disappear around them. She should have someone else in here to make sure it all stays real.

"Daryl," she whispers, and he uncoils like a snake.

He _reeks._ She has no idea why she didn't detect it the second she walked in; maybe it was the stillness of the air, and now that he's moving he's set it in motion as well. There's the smell she knows all too well, sweat and the smoke of a hundred campfires, but there's more, _worse:_ decaying flesh and blood like spoiled milk, stripped skin stretched out in the hot sun, offal. He smells like an ancient slaughterhouse that's never been cleaned.

He smells like sickness. Madness. Death.

"You made it," he whispers, lifted into a crouch. One hand out, palm flat on the floor and fingers splayed. She knows it, what he's doing. Ready to spring if he wants to.

But all she can really focus on is his voice.

It barely sounds like him. Hoarse. Croaking, rattling in his throat. Possibly he just hasn't used it in a while. Possibly he used it much too hard yesterday. Hurt himself in more ways than one.

Her hands are covering her mouth. She hadn't noticed. Her hands are covering her mouth and tears are streaming hot down her face. Because they have to. Because all of this has to happen, because it will.

"You made it," he repeats, louder. Still grating. "You got out. Said you would. You said. Said you did." He pauses, jaw working, and she thinks about how she noticed that he couldn't stand it when she cried, that it made him internally frantic. Now it's like he doesn't care. If he sees it at all. "Good. That's good for you."

She's been hit by one train already. In the distance she hears the blare of the next one approaching, and she drops her hands. She's not going to even attempt to stop crying. "So did you."

He shakes his head. "I didn't."

"You're here. You're right _here_." She takes a step, and when he doesn't recoil she takes another. Three more and he'll be close enough to touch. "You made it, Daryl. You did."

He cocks his head. It's unlike any gesture she's ever seen him make. It's the affect of a bemused animal trying to understand something incomprehensibly new. "You left me in a fuckin' car."

 _Oh God._

But it was going to happen, because it was. "We had to. There was a herd."

"You _left_ me in a fuckin' _car,_ " he says again, and more than anything else he sounds annoyed, and somehow that's worse than any rage he could possibly express, worse than any wrathful explosion. He sounds irritated, like he always used to when she did something he regarded as stupid or pointless or both.

Before things started getting better. Before _he_ did.

"Daryl-"

"Look at me." In the span of a breath he's on his feet, not hunched like she saw him before but standing erect, and though he's not a _big_ man and though she now sees with a lurch of nausea that under the rags and the filth he's thin almost to the point of emaciation, he's towering over her. He's massive. He's monstrous. "Fuckin' _look_ at me. You _look at me_ and you _TELL ME I FUCKIN' MADE IT._ "

He's not screaming now. He's not even shouting. But it has all the force of a scream, this broken hiss slicing through the air to her and slashing into her ears. She stands her ground like she did, because she will, and he's not moving but he's also _advancing_ on her and they're back in the shack and the game has just broken down into something wrenching and horrible because she said the exact wrong thing, and he's coming at her with words because some part of him is keeping him from coming at her with his fists, except that wasn't really so bad. Not compared to this. This cascade of obscenity from a man she barely recognizes.

" _You fuckin' left me, all of you, you pieces of shit, you left me there, you didn't give a fuck, I killed myself gettin' to you and you bitch, you left me, you left me and you won't fuckin' leave me alone, I didn't make it, how can you say that, you stupid little cunt, LOOK AT ME._ "

"I am."

She is. She can see his eyes now. She wasn't wrong. It wasn't her imagination. It shouldn't be possible, she's pretty sure people's eyes don't just _do_ that no matter how damaged their brain is, but at least at the moment they're completely black, pupil and iris one single pool of ink, and in the dimness the pool looks huge. Eating up the whites.

In her nightmares he lies in his own spreading pool of blood and he's so scared, in so much pain, and she can't help him. She can't hold him.

He always slips away.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, because there isn't anything else. And _I'm sorry_ is hopelessly inadequate. You don't apologize for this.

You have to live with it.

He stares at her with those mad eyes. He stares for a long time. She cries, silently, and he gives her no sign that he cares at all. Then he turns, and somehow he gathers the shadows around himself like a cloak. A veil. He's only a shape, indistinct. Nothing there she knows.

Nothing there she loves.

"Get the fuck out."

She does.

* * *

He never had a plan for this.

Not like he has plans for anything. Not like he _does_ plans anymore. Last one didn't exactly work out to his advantage; he doesn't trust plans as a rule. Structures are built only to collapse. You lean on a wall and the wall crumbles and you fall with it. So don't lean. Don't depend.

But he never had a plan, because how could he? Because they tried talking to him and that _really_ didn't go well, and then exploring the pavement again. Hurting; lots of that. He could, if he wanted, kill them all. He could, even with the weapons they have; he doesn't need the machete. Has hands, nails, has teeth. Been perfectly adequate before. No reason why they shouldn't be now.

Could kill them, maybe, so he made a little experiment and took one down and ripped, clawed, flesh giving under his teeth and blood warm sweetness on his tongue, got to another before _Rick_ made him stop. Considered making a little experiment of _Rick,_ but then he didn't want to. Looked at Rick and felt something he didn't understand. Looked up at Rick from flat on his back on the pavement, blinking in the light, and a woman there bending over him, and that was _Michonne._

Got that. Retrieved it. Knew. It's always there, he's starting to believe. Always these names and these facts and these memories and pieces and parts and shards. The trick is in finding them.

(Once he used to remember everything. Once he saw something a single time and never forgot it. Once his cataloging system was impeccable. He was a fucking mess but he was also very mentally organized. He suspects people would have been surprised if they knew. If they could have seen the contents of his head before they got painted all over a hospital hallway.)

Not that names help. Not that they're much good to him. Decided not to fight and then they put him in here, and it's dark and quiet and those are both pluses, and they fed him and that's a plus as well, but he can't see the sky at all and he doesn't like that much, and when he sits with his back to the corner and allows his gaze to roam the walls he sees them coming apart like walls always do, cracks running all through and something black and viscous beginning to ooze onto the floor. Cracks like faces, like all-black eyes. There are always holes in walls where things live and wait - yet another reason to dislike them.

Dreams of parades of ants marching out of the hole in his forehead. Worms wriggling through. He worries at the scar, which he tries not to do. More than once he's gouged it back into a wound with his fingernail. Thinks maybe it's getting bigger.

Cracks but also quiet dark he can fold himself into.

Then she sets the world on fire.

It's agony to look at her. Always was. She stands there like a pillar of pure sunlight and she _beams_ at him, makes him soot and ashes, makes him nothing. She's bright and clean and perfect in this bright clean perfect world into which he's plummeted like dropping headlong into Hell, and she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen in his life. She's so beautiful he wants to crumple to the floor and sob.

She _got out._ She _made it._ That was everything.

Six hundred miles north he's followed her song and here she is, and he can _see_ it, see it there fluttering in the cage of her ribs like an incendiary bird. Like a delicate little unburned phoenix. Trapped.

Then she tells him _he_ made it and he thinks about lunging across the room and slamming her against the wall and cracking that ribcage open with his bare hands. Rip and tear his way to that song, the one that's been tormenting him for every single mile of that six hundred. Get it in his blood-streaked fists. Crush it between his palms.

Curl into her gaping chest cavity as the last of her blood bubbles out through her nose and mouth. Close his eyes and wait for her to be still. Nestle himself against her airless lungs. Sleep there. Finally sleep in that perfect silence.

He didn't make it. He didn't make it at all. He has no idea how to help her understand. Standing there and watching her cry and thinking _good,_ good, she _should_ cry. For all the times he tried and couldn't because he can't anymore. Hated it. Likes it now. Because he's poison. Because he's a monster who looks at her and thinks about killing her and how easy it would be. Because he didn't make it. He didn't get out. Because they left him and _she left him_ and she won't leave him alone. Because everything she saw in him that was worth anything bled out into her hands and all that's left is _this._

And she should go.

So he tells her.

And she does.

And he watches that too, until he's sure it's real and she's not here anymore, and he descends into a crouch, cringes in on himself, yanks at his own matted hair. Bites at his lips, his torn fingertips. He's a piece of shit. He always hurts her. He should be punished for it.

Was that not enough? Can he ever suffer enough to make it all okay? Get it back, get everything back the way it was, everything back where it belongs, everything that got broken in him and blown apart? Everything that got carved away in that tunnel from entry to exit like something burrowed through by an insect?

Did he do something? Did he do something very bad once before all this happened and now he doesn't remember, or he can't retrieve that information from the pile of crumpled and wind-tossed paper that his very organized files have become with the passage of a bullet? Did he do something to make himself deserve this?

Fuck knows he's _done things_ since then. So it probably doesn't matter.

Tears at himself. Doesn't cry. He hasn't since he woke up in the hospital. He doubts it's possible anymore.

He didn't make it. He didn't get out.

He's just gone.


	4. you can live in this illusion

_Names of spells and names of hexes, names cursed quietly under the breath, or called out loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again, calling you home._ \- Richard Siken

 **Chapter 4: you can live in this illusion**

She doesn't get to sit in on the conversation that evening. No one does. But she contrives to be in the house when she knows Rick is there - dropping off a box of homemade soap - and she lingers alone in the hall. And she hears.

She hears enough.

Deanna is not pleased.

 _-don't know what you're expecting from me. Even if I say yes, how do you think everyone else is going to take it? This is exactly what we have Aaron out there to_ avoid.

 _You don't know him. He's hurt. He's_ scared. _He got shot in the damn head. How is he_ supposed _to be normal?_

Rick. That tone he gets when he's trying to keep his cool, is mostly managing to, but beneath the facade is edging dangerously close to the point of clamping his hands around someone's throat and squeezing until they give him what he wants. He used an earlier, less violent version of it with Daddy at the farm. Back when he used to default to talking to strange people instead of jamming the muzzle of a gun against their foreheads. Back when he hadn't been out there too long.

He has. Deanna knows it. Everyone knows it. Beth doesn't imagine that's helping his case here.

 _I'm not expecting him to be normal._ Weary. Beth sympathizes. The front hall is softly, warmly lit and she leans back against a clear patch of wall painted in a tasteful eggshell and closes her eyes into that softness as Deanna's low, rough voice comes like the scratch of a fingernail at the back of her neck. _I'm not expecting_ anything _from him, Rick. I'm sure as_ hell _not_ blaming _him for anything. But people saw what he did. They're already frightened of him._ Pause. _You know what he reminds them of._

Eyes closed, red behind her lids deepening. Deanna isn't talking to her, doesn't know she's there, but she nods. She thought it early and she thought it hard and then she put it aside as something obvious and beyond her control that there was no point in addressing. It's been a couple of weeks now and it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, but a few people still _died_ and everyone is walking around like bells still vibrating from their last blow. Still sounding low, shivering tones.

What Maggie said he was doing. Scratching and biting. Before, with the machete. Later in the cell. What he looked like. His eyes.

He might as well have a W painted on his forehead.

Instead of that little crater scar that she hasn't yet really seen but which she knows is there. Because it has to be.

 _He ain't that._ Rick is very quiet. _He ain't like that at all. He's one of the best men I've ever known. That man is still in there. Whatever else he's been through…_ Pause. The kind of pause that serves as a vacuum. It sucks everything else into it until it's sealed.

Beth doesn't breathe.

 _You can't ask me to let him be sent back out there. You can't do that._

Deanna, just as quiet. Just as hard. _He'd probably survive out there better than anyone in here._

 _He doesn't belong out there._ Here it is, suddenly; the crack in Rick's voice. The crack in _Rick._ Rick has also been out there too long, and Rick is all hard shell and scar tissue and sharp edges and spines, but Rick still feels. He might try not to sometimes, but he does, and she squeezes her eyes shut and bites down hard on her lip.

She doesn't want to cry. Not here. Not anywhere.

 _He doesn't belong out there. I know him. I do._

 _He needs his family._

Long silence. She should go. She should go back to the house and try to eat something. She basically hasn't all day, and a good while ago her stomach gave up nagging her and her belly is this numb hollow space, and she doesn't _want_ anything, but she should eat.

Peanut butter and jelly and pig's feet, and she's biting blood into her mouth. PB&J. Sucking at his sticky fingers. She knew he did it to make her laugh. Scooped her into his arms to make her laugh, too. Wanted that. She can think of so few things she ever knew him to genuinely _want._

She shoves herself away from the wall, stumbles blindly toward the door. Behind her, what she already knew would happen is happening.

 _He stays with you. You're responsible for him. He goes_ anywhere, _one of your people goes with him. I'm going to have Denise evaluate him and I'm going to listen to what she says. This is probation, Rick. That's all._

Over her shoulder, the final thing she hears as she pushes the door open and steps out into the relentless cricket-song, last red streaks of daylight overhead.

 _None of this is secure. None of it. You know that better than anyone. You know what's at stake. We've both had to make sacrifices to keep this place safe._

 _You know we're not done making them._

* * *

They break open the dark.

Not like her. It's not her. That much is immediately obvious; they don't _glow_ like she does. They don't blind him or burn him. They don't sing cracks through his head with their voices. He can't decide if he's disappointed or not and anyway it's not like it matters much; the light is the light and it hurts his eyes. Backs against the wall, blinking. Arm up. He'll fight. He doesn't honestly think he'll have to, at least not immediately, but he will.

Them. _Rick._ Okay, got that one. Next is _Michonne_ and Michonne has a sword, and that was always interesting. Much more interesting than a gun; he feels kinship with that. Likeness. She has it now and that's good to see.

And there's the last one and he remembers her from when he came in, she was there and he didn't find her name then but now it tumbles off a high shelf and strikes him in the face, an edge and a corner and he feels like he's bleeding. Puts a hand up to check.

He's not. Her hands on his face. She's not afraid of him. She's not horrified. She's not disgusted. He cringes back but she doesn't let him go.

(This was one of the first qualities in her that truly hit him in his softer parts, that left a different kind of mark: The way she wouldn't be shaken off, seemed to feel that he was worth the contact and did so in an insistent and even stubborn way that he found new and disturbing, and desperately wanted.)

She doesn't let him go and it was like this before when he ran to her, held her hand when they went off the overpass; they could have died then and he didn't really believe they would but she wouldn't have been the worst company for it.

Not at all.

She tells him _it's okay_ and oh my God he wants to believe her, he does.

But he's not sure he can.

Telling him to come with them. She's framing his face with her hands, Carol is. Those hands used to be soft. All rough and calloused now, just like the rest of her. Just like all of them because none of them actually made it, none of them got out, no one does, no one ever does.

The good ones don't survive and neither does anyone else.

He lets them lead him out. Lets her. Takes his hand and he clenches his fist but he doesn't yank it free. Someone is touching his shoulder but he jerks, bares his teeth, and they go away. She can. No one else. Not even sure about her but he remembers that it was okay all those times before so maybe it still will be, even if he's not that person anymore. Even if that person died a fucking hallway while ants marched out of the bloody crater in the back of his head and swarmed across the floor.

It might be okay.

Not like _her._ She burns him. He remembers that too. He was crying and she held him and his skin was bubbling. Blackening, cracking open and weeping. She'll do that again if she gets too close. She'll do it because she can't help it. It's what she is.

He is what he is and he's nothing. Which is a better thing to be.

(Once again: He's highly distractible now. It's a trait he dislikes.)

Quiet street. It's bizarre. He looks around; this is insane. This is far, far more insane than he is. Being led down a normal-looking street in a nicer neighborhood than he just about ever _saw_ before the dead started walking - big windows and porches and wide lawns - and what was alien before is almost incomprehensible now. These people are clean. These people aren't bleeding from anywhere. These people look like they've eaten, like they've slept. They stare at him and he stares back because _fuck them is why_ and he already knows within a few seconds of seeing each one that they're stupid and slow and soft and out there they would be extremely dead extremely quickly.

And he can kill any of them at any time with his bare fucking hands, and that's a comforting thought. So he holds onto it, like Carol is holding onto him.

Stopping. Looking around; it all looks the same but they're saying this is their house - they have a fucking _house,_ what the _fuck_ \- and he's going to stay here. Like hell he is, but he stands and closes his eyes, tips his head back and breathes and just for a moment he doesn't smell rotting flesh and hear screams. He smells a summer evening, cut grass and the faintest hint of the afternoon's warm asphalt. Someone's garden, close. Rich soil and rosemary and oregano. Somewhere, cooking meat. A couple of kids playing. Screaming, yeah, but laughing screams, fake kid screams, the kind that shouldn't ever happen anymore. Muffled conversation.

Someone is playing a piano.

He opens his eyes and the houses are roaring with flames and they're huge, towering over him, blackened skeletal frames. Bodies crawling toward him down that street and across those wide lawns, some walkers and some not, some rasping and wheezing as their dead lungs melt in their chests and some screaming away the lining of their throats as their eyes burst open and their hair crackles. They're all on fire. Everything is on fire. Everything is burning. Dying. Dead.

Soon: A fall of ash like silent snow.

They can't see it. None of them can. They're all just _living_ like everything is normal, like it's something you can still _do._

He would like very much to set this place on fire for real. He would like very much to watch this place burn to the fucking ground and then he would like to piss on the ashes.

Then he would like to find her and carry her charred little body away.

He walks up the porch steps and inside. The flames, like almost everyone else, don't touch him.


	5. and if you look at your reflection

**Chapter 5: and if you look at your reflection**

 _Sweetheart, is that you? There are no tears, no pictures of him squarely._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Inside it's not better.

If he's honest - and the idea of not being so is as bizarre to him as the nightmare time-travel world out there - he preferred the little room. On one hand it was closed off and dim and very quiet and sort of claustrophobic; on the other hand it was closed off and dim and very quiet and sort of claustrophobic. There was a corner he could back himself into. No surprises. Anyone coming at him, he saw. Not a lot of control but as much as he can reasonably expect right now.

Here it's bright and he's exposed on all sides and his footsteps echo weirdly on the hardwood, their voices, telling him about a room and food, and a _shower_ which he feels like he should grasp but doesn't, because why is it something he should have cared about when he was out there where everything still makes sense?

Anyway, he doesn't like it here.

Didn't like it _there_ either but this is a more significant degree of dislike.

At least there aren't any more people. It's just _Rick_ and _Michonne_ and _Carol_ and he notes that aloud, notes that there are maybe supposed to be others. Not like he wants them, but it's a thing he should understand. Doesn't. Rick says something about not wanting to _overwhelm_ him. Can see others when he's ready.

How the fuck is he supposed to know if he's ready or not?

Doesn't even want to fucking _be_ here.

Scans the room - fireplace with molding, paintings, couch, loveseat, glass coffee table, rug, doorway into what appears to be a kitchen, very shiny. All of it shiny and bright. Lamps and light colors. So clean.

He looks down at his hands, streaked brown and black with dried blood and entrails. Dirt and more blood packed under his splintered fingernails. He doesn't belong here. He'll fuck it all up and for some reason he doesn't actually want to do that, even if he'd still like to burn this whole place down. He should go back.

Mumbles something to that effect. Rick says no. Very quiet. Carol echoes. No, he shouldn't go back. He'll get used to it. He'll _adjust._

Is there any point here at which he gets any kind of say in this?

Doesn't ask that. Not sure he wants to deal with the fallout he imagines an answer would involve. Anyway he's hungry. In life hungry takes precedence over everything else except water and safety and getting out of the rain and cold.

They sit him down. Table, reddish-brown wood, glossy like fox's fur. He touches it. Runs his dirty fingers over it and wonders if he shouldn't but no one tries to stop him so he does it again. So smooth, cool. Almost slick. He has no idea if he likes it or not. Isn't sure if he wants to touch it more or stop completely. He thinks maybe both.

(This is a dilemma he often faced in the earlier time before: Profound ambivalence, and confusion regarding whether he wanted something or not and whether he was allowed to want it if he did. Not infrequently he would want something and hate it for making him want it. It complicated everything. Eventually he came to understand that wanting was something to which he was allowed, at least when it came to some specific things. But about other things he remained uncertain up until the point at which it all abruptly and entirely ceased to matter.)

They feed him. Bread and venison. Some kind of greens the name of which escapes him. They're limp and the flavor is too sharp so he leaves them be but he wolfs down the venison and the bread. Been eating well since he got here, eating so well he felt sick at first, but his hunger hasn't abated. Or only very temporarily. Slightly disturbing. He used to be able to go for a couple days without food. Wasn't a huge problem.

Uses his hands. Yes, he knows what a fork is and what it's for. He's offended by the concept. Why the fuck would he want to slow down the process? Why the fuck would he want to eat _less_ and _slowly?_

Clears the plate. They give him more. He eats that too. Could eat even more but should stop. He doesn't think he has to be eating with the expectation that it might be a while before his next meal. At least for now it seems like he's tumbled into a positive cornucopia and he can relax a little. A _little._

So now there's this whole shower thing.

Grits his teeth. Why? Why the fuck should he? But he knows why. Remembers. Shit, knows he smells awful. Hasn't been able to tell in a long time but he can draw conclusions from his general state. It doesn't bother _him,_ so why should he give a fuck? Why should he do anything of the kind?

He's not even sure where the resistance is coming from. Only knows that he wants to resist. Clothes coming off: No. Fuck you. Pushes back from the table, growls. Rick backs up, hands raised when he rises from the chair; very good. Dominance. Because that's something else he does remember about this man: Servility. Canine desire to please. Wanted to make him happy. Was willing to do things and agree to things he disliked to make _Rick_ happy.

He is not Rick's fucking dog. Fuck that.

Michonne also, close. Whatever. Cares less about her. Feels vaguely guilty about something. It can't possibly matter right now.

He doesn't belong here. They can't make him belong here. For the first time he's starting to really get it: None of this is free. They're trying to _fix him._ He gets food and clean water and shelter and safety if he's good, if he does what they say, and _fuck that too._

 _I don't think I've ever relied on anyone for anything._

(As far as he was concerned, in those moments he was not only a tremendous piece of shit but a tremendous liar. As far as he _was_ concerned. He still supposes he was lying but it seems fantastically unimportant now.)

(Anyway it's not like she couldn't tell.)

But there's Carol, and he already knows it. Knows she'll be there, hand on his shoulder. Soft. Even though he can feel her hardness. Not like him because all of her brain is still in place but closer than not. Wants to sag under the weight of that touch and he snarls and wrenches away and calls her _bitch_ and tells her to _get the fuck off_.

Made her cry like that once. She's not crying now. He can't make her cry. Knows he can't, no matter what he does to her. She doesn't cry anymore.

She's like him. She is. Or she's near enough.

And she asks him to try.

Oh, why did she have to use that word, _why_ did she have to use that fucking _word,_ she also remembers like he does or did and she stockpiles ammunition and she'll use it when she's pushed. She's not even pushed now. She just wants something from him and she'll use what she has on him and he doesn't have any defense against it.

 _Please try._ And he whimpers and hates himself.

Because he'll try.

* * *

It's the fucking mirror. Christ, it's the mirror, he should have known that was coming and he kind of did but not like _this._

She's in here with him. Just her. This is worse than down there, this is so much cleaner and also it's cold and it shines even more and the light bounces around in a way that unsettles him deeply, and there's the fucking mirror and it's worse than he could have ever imagined.

She didn't make him look or anything. He just looked.

He dimly recalls how he used to be. But this is not about comparison between _before_ and _now_. This is just about the thing, the thing in itself, the thing that is _him._ This thing that doesn't _belong_ and won't ever, because even if he does what they want, you don't just get rid of something like this. You don't just wash it _off._ You cover it _over_.

This is what he'll always be.

Hunched, filthy, stringy matted hair hanging in his face, hollow cheekbones, sunken eyes. Death's head, and isn't _that_ so fucking appropriate, he wants to laugh.

Scared of how it would echo.

But it's his eyes. That's the worst. His eyes. What he sees there. Because there's no light in them. There should be. That's how eyes are. They catch light, they reflect. They glisten and gleam. They glitter. Spark, shine. Even glow.

 _Hers_ glow but that only follows. She's light embodied. Incarnate, a merciless deity. Her gaze scorches.

His eyes are black pits. Light falls into them and is gone.

There's the scar, of course there's the scar, but the scar is his most banal feature. He has lots of scars. One more is nothing to get all worked up about. The damage is done. It's not like focusing on the damn scar can change anything. It's not like anything can make him well. It's not like he's not broken beyond repair. It's not like he's not what it would be like if he drove his fist into the fucking mirror and shattered and bled all over everything.

Carol is behind him, getting him a towel and turning on the water. He can see her. His black pit eyes are on her as he lunges forward and slams his forehead into it and pulls back and does it again and again, long slivers of glass sticking out of his face and tinkle of shards on porcelain and tile and blood everywhere just like the hallway, pouring out of his head just like before, and it's perfect and she's screaming and he's laughing and laughing and laughing.

No. He's not. He doesn't do any of that.

He takes the towel and she leaves.

He turns away from the mirror and stands there for a moment.

Maybe it's not so bad. He's by himself. No one is watching him. It could be, they could be watching him without him knowing, but there are a limited number of things he can know and also a limited number of things he can care about, and all of a sudden he's just so fucking tired. And his head is hurting. It's not bad yet but the lights are too bright and getting brighter and rainbows are starting to dance around the edges of his vision, and it will be.

So he turns the lights off. He's not sure what he needs them for anyway. There's light through the window. It's a clear night and the moon is almost full.

He likes the moon. He knows that for certain.

It's been a long time since he was naked. He can't really remember. Also the last time he bathed. Sometimes there were streams and creeks and a couple of times he had to swim across rivers, and there was rain, but it was a liability. Shouldn't smell human. As for being naked, why? When he has clothes, why the hell would he want to take them off unless he needs to?

But he's doing it now.

He has skin. He's aware of it in a way he hasn't been in… Again, not sure how long. Feels so strange. Cool air - the crust of sweat and dirt and blood on the parts of him that his clothes covered is slightly thinner. He strips to the waist, takes a breath, wavers. Squeezes his eyes shut. He's standing in a pool of moonlight and even if no one is with him he feels far too exposed.

Naked with himself, and when it comes to himself he's not exactly a fan. He is not a Daryl Dixon enthusiast.

(Mental references to himself by name are now rare. Some of it is forgetfulness but far more of it is because he likes the name as little as he likes the rest of himself, and he is also highly skeptical regarding its utility. He is simply _He,_ because for a long time he has been the only He that matters, at least in any practical sense. Material value is all he wants to and is prepared to handle.)

The rest of it. Leaves it in a pile on the floor. They'll probably want to get rid of it all. Perhaps he should have a problem with that but he doesn't, and it's not so much that he has any attachment to the goddamn stuff as it is that he's having trouble caring about that too. He's confident that they'll give him something to replace them. To the extent that he's thinking about it at all.

Very much against his will, he's thinking about his body.

He's all bones. He's all hard angles. Ribs and jutting hips. Scars everywhere - more now than he knows he had before. Muscle, yes, and not an inconsiderable amount of it, but there's nothing between it and his skin. He looks patchy and discolored and pale. His dick is a sad little thing hanging from the mess of his pubic hair. Not that he cares about that particular detail. Not that he gives a shit about any of it.

Except he does.

He doesn't cry anymore, _can't_ cry, but he looks down at himself and he kind of wishes he could.

 _Look at me and tell me I made it._

His limbs numbly move themselves. Awkward. Stilted and clumsy. He's a thing that has never moved and he's not used to it. Like this, never. Almost slips getting under the spray and hisses at the sudden heat. The water is like a hail of needles. That image, them sticking out of his back all slick with blood and running into the crack of his ass, down his legs, swirling pink around the drain.

Something is swirling but it's an awful grayish black.

Char and ashes.

Hair dripping in his face. He doesn't push it away. He leans his forehead against the cool tile and sighs his way into a pained moan. He hurts so much. He hurts from his head down to everywhere. He shouldn't be here. Doesn't know how to be. This world is not for him, and he doesn't think it would have been for him even before his head got blown apart.

But he opens his eyes and there's the moon pouring itself through the cascade of droplets and turning them silver and crystal. He lifts a hand and catches them in his palm, on the back of his hand. Turns it and turns it like meat on a spit. Fingers and knuckles washing clean.

It's beautiful.

He doesn't get to be touched by anything beautiful.

He should use soap. He makes an abortive attempt. Could be he does okay. His hair too, kind of. Some of the worst tangles washing out. Then he sinks to the floor and draws his knees up against his chest and lowers his head to rest on them. The cooling water does feel like rain now. Heavy rain. He's caught in a storm. Thunder is crashing in his head and he's exhausted and he doesn't know what he's doing here and he doesn't know why he's anywhere at all. He's thinking about how it would be if he could make it all go away. If he could do that.

There's the mirror. There's how she used it. What she did. Or tried to do.

Very dimly, very far in the back of his shattered mind, he notices that. Notes it.

Files it away.


	6. grey would be the color if I had a heart

**Chapter 6: grey would be the color if I had a heart**

 _A seaside framed in glass, and boats, those little boats with sails aflutter, shining lights upon the water, lights that splinter when they hit the pier._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She's on her way to her morning shift on the wall when Rick comes to her.

He catches her down the block from the house. She has her rifle slung over her shoulder and she turns and watches him cover the last few yards to her - and this is yet another thing she was fairly certain would happen, just like she's fairly certain about what he's going to say and why.

The weight of the rifle is grounding, an anchor, and she allows herself to be pulled by it, and she doesn't think of the weight of the crossbow - the weight she remembers a little of every time she shoulders the rifle, every time she raises it and takes aim. Big gun for a small girl and she handles it with an accuracy that shut the few initial scoffers up right quick. Her first shift on the wall, the ones who hadn't seen her shoot were amused. Then they saw her shoot and they weren't amused anymore. They were just staring at her

And she didn't think about how he would have been so proud of her, and he would have been trying to hide it and not doing very well.

She hasn't seen the crossbow since the day he died. They left it behind. Just dropped it. It didn't even get as much as the trunk. Could have been buried with him like a hero in a legend entombed with his sword.

So Rick comes, and when he reaches her he stops and looks down at her, eyes shadowed in the mid-morning light.

She doesn't wait for him to speak. She just asks. Wonders if she might be doing him a favor by getting there first.

"How is he?"

"He's alright." Rick rolls a shoulder. His voice is low. Steady. It doesn't sound like he's expending too much effort in keeping it that way, which is good. "He ate some dinner. Didn't make trouble." He gives her the faintest, thinnest edge of a smile. "Actually took a goddamn shower."

She laughs. It's as thin as his smile, hollow, and she doesn't really feel it, but she does. It won't make him less insane, but at least he won't look so much that way. Be good for everyone else, in terms of their ease. Be good for him, perhaps in a number of ways.

"Gave him his own room. He slept. Pretty sure he did, anyway."

"Not in the bed," she says. Not a question.

"No." Rick hesitates. "On the floor. Took the covers and the pillow and made up a place in the corner."

"So he couldn't get snuck up on." Yes. He wouldn't do anything else. She looks away and releases a long breath. It doesn't shake much. Across the street, middle-aged Mrs. Campbell is bending over her rose bushes, shears in her gloved hand. They gleam in the sun.

The Wolves would have said - with plain and almost innocent earnestness - that Mrs. Campbell and her rose bushes don't belong here. They would have said she and they should both die, for their own good. She knows without having to verify it that Daryl would completely agree.

"Won't let Carol cut his hair." Again, thin smile. Thin amusement. "But yeah. He's doin' alright. At least so far. Not sure I'm gonna have Carl and Judith come back tonight, but maybe tomorrow. Carol should probably stay." He pauses again, and she isn't looking at him but she feels the weight of his scrutiny like the rifle on her shoulder. "Right now it seems like he's most comfortable with her. At any rate he'll _listen_ to her, which is more than he'll do for Michonne and me most of the time."

"They're fine with us another night." He hasn't asked. Probably already knew he wouldn't have to. But there's more, and she turns her gaze back on him and his awkwardness is like an aura shimmering around him. Rick is hardly ever truly awkward anymore. It's not a good look for him. It does unattractive things to his shoulders. His hands. As if he's literally vibrating - almost imperceptibly - with the thing he doesn't want to say and knows he'll have to regardless.

 _Spit it out, asshole._ She's tired. She didn't sleep much. Could have taken another Klonopin - Denise almost certainly would have given her one - but sedatives don't grow on trees and she's gone with less sleep before, and anyway…

Anyway, she can think of other people who might need it more than her.

"I'm guessin' you already know I think you should stay away from him." Abruptly his awkwardness is gone and he's just standing there, Rick Grimes, hard around the crust and the mantle with a softer, churning core. Not exactly thrilled about it, but doing what he has to do without a single second guess. "Not for good. Just for now. Just till he's doin' better."

Because of course he'll do better. Of course no other possibility is going to be admitted here. Mostly Rick is a bloodless realist, and he would obviously like people to think he is _all_ the time, but the part of him that still wants to believe hasn't been entirely burned out of him, and now and then it crawls to the surface and peeks its scarred head out into the sun of the world. Daryl will get better because Daryl will get better, because that's what's going to happen, and it wouldn't kill everyone to have a little faith.

Yes, it will. Faith kills people all the time. Sure as hell never saved anyone.

But she wants to believe it too. She really does. She wants to believe that she didn't see what she saw in Daryl's eyes. Which was nothing. A gaping hole where he used to be. Burrowed into and eaten out from the inside.

How in her mind she saw the maggots in him. Making him a decaying shell.

She nods. Yes, she knows. "I talked to him," she says quietly.

"Michonne told me."

Of course she did. "Don't tell me it was stupid. I know it was."

"He wasn't gonna go after you." Confidence in that. Not stupid confidence. Rick is a lot of things right now, including optimistic to the point of possible delusion, but stupid is not one of them. Maybe Daryl isn't _Daryl_ anymore, but Rick can look at someone and read them passably well, and Daryl has always been shit at hiding things. And that's one aspect of him that she doubts has changed. "He wasn't goin' after you before. Not like that. He wasn't meaning to hurt you."

"No. He wasn't."

Wasn't meaning to. But he might have anyway. Out of sheer desperation. Terror. Out of the confused, anguished rage he spat at her in the cell. He might have crushed her just trying to hold onto her. He might have choked her to death simply clutching her to him. She can easily conceive of that. She saw something else in him, and it's that he's not totally sure of anything he sees or hears or feels. He's not sure of anything at all.

That alone is immensely dangerous.

She should stay away from him.

"He's gonna get better," Rick says softly. Echo and emphasis both. "He just needs some time. He made it this far."

And she can't take it anymore. Because she held him in that fucking hallway and she was soaked in his fucking blood and she watched the bullet that should have been for her crash into his fucking skull and blow it apart, and she spent the last couple months of her life convinced that his body rotted away to nothing in the trunk of a fucking car without a funeral or flowers or a song at his graveside and sure, Rick loved him and _loves_ him and Rick isn't stupid but Rick doesn't understand a fucking thing.

"Go look at him and tell me he made it."

She turns before he can say anything else and walks away.

* * *

She should stay away from him. And she will. But the houses are across the damn street from each other and there's only so much she can do. She comes home later in the afternoon, hungry and tired and sweaty from the early summer sun, and the thing is that she's sure where he is. Where in the house. What room they'll have put him in. Spare bedroom downstairs which used to be Michonne's until - without fanfare or comment from anyone - Michonne moved up into Rick's room as if she'd always been there. Way to the side of the house but it has a view of the street obstructed only by the spreading branches of a small Japanese maple.

Not enough to block her from him.

He'll be watching the street. He'll be watching because he is.

She's telling herself to not stop. Keep on walking. She's spent all day trying not to think about him and somehow she's just about succeeded, and she doesn't have much further to go. A few more yards. Up the porch steps and inside. Go to her room and curl up in her bed and try to doze. Try to continue to selectively forget him. But she _feels_ him looking at her and she stops, hands clenched into fists - one at her side and one around the strap of the rifle - trembling slightly because all of her is trembling slightly, her eyes locked shut.

How much is she hurting him simply by doing this? By simply standing here where he can see? How much damage is she causing? How much is he willing to forgive?

How much does he want?

 _I'm sorry,_ she thinks - mouths silently. She just wants to go inside and maybe not go to bed, maybe play with Judith and go back to trying to pretend to be normal, which in her admittedly subjective opinion she had actually been getting semi-decent at. She doesn't get to have that now. That might be her penance. _I'm sorry, Daryl, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry._

He's gone. The pressure of his observation. Closed his eyes or turned away, but it feels like he vanished. He was never there. The room is empty and his return was just another nightmare in an endless series, stretching forever into a future of pretending to be everything she's not, because you can't belong here if you're as fucked up as she is. Even if in her most brutally honest moments she's not sure she wants to be here at all.

That's her penance too.

She climbs heavily up the porch steps and goes into the house. She curls up on her bed. She doesn't sleep, and she doesn't come out for the rest of the evening.

* * *

Can't look at her anymore.

Wanted to. Did. Like staring directly into the sun; he's blind now. Stumbles toward the stripped bed he couldn't bear to sleep in, half falls onto it and once again feels his new clothes like a net in which he's been trapped. Whines very softly and it hurts his throat, because God, _God,_ she's so beautiful and he can't do this, he can't begin to process how it's possible that he's here in the same _universe_ as her, crashed his way into it, and seeing her there, now, he does want to stay here, wants to even if he doesn't belong here and never will.

She does. In another life she could have helped him. Even if she couldn't have taught him how to do it, she could have taught him how to pretend.

He wants to say he's sorry. Rip down the door, launch himself through the window, sprint across the lawn and the street and tumble to his knees in front of her and grope for her hand, let her burn him. He deserves it, he should burn. He's sorry, he's so sorry he said those things to her, he didn't mean them, he dragged his ruined fucking carcass six hundred miles to find her and he has and he has everything he wants if she won't turn her radiant face away, won't abandon him in the silence without her song, if she won't leave him again.

He forgives her for that, oh, he does, he _does,_ he never could have blamed her for that, never.

She's perfect, sinless, and he's wretched and he would joyfully die for her a hundred thousand times more and he's so sorry.

No. No, he's not. He's not sorry. He's not sorry at all. She's a heartless little bitch and she left him, and she's been hurting him ever since simply because she _can,_ because she has the power to do it and it amuses her to toy with him. Called him north like a siren, dashed him to pieces on her rocks. She'd laugh at him for it because he's pathetic and predictable. Trainable. He won't be Rick's dog but he'll be hers, parasites and mange and sickness, shit-caked hindquarters, heart full of worms.

Rabid now.

Christ, she made him want her. Realizing it. Bits and pieces of it. Aching to be there on his knees in front of her. Wanting that. Made him.

 _Cunt._

She stopped there on purpose. She knew he'd see her. So sprint across the lawn, across the street, grip her by her delicate throat and hurl her to the ground and smash her head against the pavement, break that beautiful face into ragged shards of bone and mangled flesh, crack her skull open and spill her brain across the street and crush it into paste with his heel like the butt of a cigarette and see how _she_ likes it.

See how she likes dying for no reason.

 _No_.

Breath so tight it won't come, fists beating at the inside of his lungs. Drawing his legs up and curling onto the bare mattress, squeaking springs under his weight like tiny screams. Like he's hurting them. Everywhere, hurting. Raking his fingers into his hair and yanking at it until his eyes should be watering but they're bone dry.

He can't cry.

He's so sorry. For thinking these things, for being what he is, for being where he doesn't belong. He's so sorry. He's not. He is. He's not. He hates her. He could _kill_ her, he hates her so much for what she's doing to him now.

He loves her so much he wants to burst into flames.

He does, he is. For her. He's burning in this empty bed. He's burning down to nobody and nothing, which is what he is. Was before and is now and always will be.

And he's so sorry.


	7. that part of me isn't here anymore

_**Note:** _ Three things.

First, I've decided to do something very mean. Those of you who are familiar with my stuff - especially _Safe Up Here With You_ and _I'll Be Yours For a Song_ \- will know that I subscribe to the notion that authorial cruelty is useful when used well (killing a character stupidly for no reason and then going ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ is not using it well). To a significant degree, I write things like this to fuck with people. I am fucking with you (I told you at the beginning that you were proceeding at your own risk).

So **I'm not going to warn you when the ending for this is coming.** It's just going to end.

And this might be the first fic I've ever written in this fandom where I can't promise an uplifting ending.

The second thing is to emphasize that - as with _Safe Up Here With You_ \- I'm playing _very_ fast and loose with things like traumatic brain injury. I'm not doing much to make this medically accurate or anything. If I get stuff right, it's probably by accident. I realize and completely own that this is an extremely problematic thing to do, given that this is real stuff that truly affects people's lives in profound and profoundly difficult ways.

So this is an admission, an apology, and a warning that if you're likely to find that upsetting, it's happening here.

In addition to all the other massively upsetting stuff going on.

The final thing is that I want to make it very clear that - as with _I'll Be Yours For a Song_ and _Safe Up Here With You_ \- **this is not just a Bethyl story.** The focus of this is not purely romance. It's about Beth and Daryl and their relationship, yes - I mean, obviously - but it's about a lot of other stuff, and their relationship is one thing of many. I don't want people to expect something and then be disappointed. I've had people say things to me like "if they're not going to end up together, I wish I never started reading this." Fair enough. People who depend on that kind of ending to make the whole thing worth it for them may want to consider reading something else.

I'm not saying this won't have an ending where they're together. I'm just refusing to promise that. So don't ask me to. And it's not the point of the story.

If you stick around, thank you for reading. As always. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 7:** **that part of me isn't here anymore**

 _The names of flowers that open only once, shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep, or caught in the throat like a lump of meat._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

The Boy and the Baby come back.

He's been told they're _coming back,_ anyway, and he draws his own conclusions. A healthy portion of his mind got blown out the back of his skull but he's not an idiot. The Boy and the Baby are Rick's, were living with Rick, and they weren't here when _he_ got here, so the obvious implication is that the Boy and the Baby were sent away because of him.

They can come back now because Rick and Michonne and maybe Carol have decided that he's not a threat.

It's possible. He's still really not sure. A lot of the time he thinks he's a threat to everyone including himself, but he's been living that way for a very long time now and he's used to it. And his context has changed. Some pretty major things have changed. Maybe he's only a threat sometimes. Maybe he's not one so much anymore. Maybe the things he sometimes thinks about doing to people, to himself, aren't going to happen.

Maybe the things he was thinking about doing to _her_ aren't going to happen.

Maybe he won't do them.

It's been two days since he saw her and it's hurting less. Everything is hurting less. He can't remember if he actually told Carol about his headaches or if she found out on her own somehow, but they had pills to give him for the last big one, and he took them with enormous skepticism and not a little suspicion but they actually helped. Didn't make it go away, but he closed the curtains in his room and curled up in his nest in the corner and weathered it. It passed. He didn't feel as sick and it didn't last as long, and after it was over he felt all right.

Rick says he'll _get better_. Rick is full of shit. Rick is completely and utterly full of shit, has been for a long time, but he looks in Rick's sharp, clear eyes for a few seconds and looks away again and as far as concepts go…

In some world he guesses it might work out that way.

(On more than one occasion it's been a source of extremely dark amusement to him that one of the things left to him is his imagination. More than left to him; always a powerful mental instrument, it seems as though its power has grown beyond containment. It does what it wants to do, follows its own courses of logic, and if he's lucky it clues him in regarding what's going on. So the consideration of hypotheticals, though he finds it annoying and pointless, is very much within his capabilities.)

Anyway, the Boy and the Baby come back, and the Boy stands in the doorway and _looks_ at him there on the couch like he is every bit the threat Rick and Michonne and Carol have apparently decided he isn't, and he looks back at the Boy with no offer of argument. No, he was wrong. He knows it instantly. The Boy is right, what he's not saying, what he's saying in every way that isn't about speaking - in his eyes and his stance and where he's holding his hands. The Boy is right: He's a threat. He's a threat and that hasn't changed, and he might as well resign himself to being one. Hoping that it doesn't come out. Hoping that even if he's a threat, even if he's dangerous and full of poison, he can successfully pretend that he isn't. Because really, really now if he's totally honest with himself, abandons all the many many lies he knows he's been imbibing as a regular part of his diet because a lot of the time he's not sure _what's_ true anymore…

He hopes he can pretend because he thinks he might like to stay. For now.

(Hope is something with which his relationship remains difficult. He understands its stupidity and its uselessness and the trap it presents, the ways it can in fact be a liability of the worst kind, but he also recognizes that it's nearly impossible to avoid. You want things. You dare to imagine that you might get them, especially if your imagination is a good one. It _is_ a trap, one he's constantly caught in, and he regards the entire business as an unbelievably bad joke and hates it as much as he hates anything, and hates himself for falling into it again and again and again when the world should have taught him better.)

Carol follows behind with the Baby. He looks at the Baby for a moment and then he can't anymore. Gets up. Goes to his room and shuts the door. Sinks down onto the floor with his back against it and squeezes his eyes closed and hope is a bad joke but he _hopes_ that no one tries to make him come out.

No one tries to make him come out. He stays in there through dinner, and after he listens to plates and knives and forks clinking and voices talking around - he gathers - that slick fox-fur table, there's a soft knock on his door and something scuffling on the floor outside. And footsteps going down the hall.

He opens the door. There's a tray, plate, meat and potatoes and rolls.

Carol didn't bother with silverware, but there's a napkin.

He drags the tray back inside and shuts the door again.

Carol. There's Carol and that's a good thing. Actual good thing. They exist, here. One does. More, could be. Chances aren't amazing but it's not impossible. He has food and clean water and he's safe _for now_ and he has four walls and a roof. And people are mostly leaving him alone. Was expecting they'd be continuing with him as their little project, _fix him_ like he thought, but so far that hasn't happened.

Eating in the twilight, sucking at his fingers and staring at the half-curtained window. World outside there. All big, feeling bigger now. She's in that world, somewhere. No, not _somewhere_ ; he hasn't seen her since that time but he knows where she is. He knows exactly where she fucking is.

He could go to her anytime he wanted. Bathe in her fire.

In her blood.

Maybe he's not a threat. Maybe he won't do those things. To her.

Maybe.

* * *

Carol sits him down. Sits in the living room. Doesn't like that; exposed, even though he can be in here sometimes and it's not unbearable. Pulls in on himself, hunches, won't hold his eyes still. No one else is in here and he knows that except for the Baby they're all off doing whatever the fuck it is they do when they're not here, but that could change at any time, someone could just _come in,_ and he has no control over this and while he's pretty sure he's been behind these walls close to a week now and lack of control over his immediate environment has been less of a problem, it abruptly and very much is.

Reading signals. Reading her. She knows. Knows he's uncomfortable, knows he doesn't like it, and she's trying to make him do it anyway. Trying to make him _try._ Seething resentment. Resentment like a pit of snakes. He still hasn't figured out how to say _no_ to her in a way that'll stick.

Sitting in the armchair. Her across from him in the loveseat. He thinks that's a very stupid term; that might be a holdover from before the hallway and the bullet. Thinking that. He has preferences and opinions which managed to cling to the walls of his skull, along with a fair amount of his memory even if he can't always retrieve certain pieces when he wants them.

(Predicting what will take his mind by the hand and lead it into a session of wandering is nearly impossible. It might be anything; there's no logic behind it that he's been able to discern, to the extent that he's tried at all.)

Picking at his fingers. They haven't healed. Broken nails less broken but his fingertips were chewed up by the pavement and then chewed up by himself. Hasn't completely stopped chewing. It's better but there are still a lot of scabs and he bites them off and they bleed.

Carol watches him do this and then she watches his face, and he stares back at her through the stringy curtain of his hair because fuck it, if she knows he's uncomfortable he wants her to know that _he knows._

She's making him do this and he doesn't understand why.

She talks. He listens. He can do that. Listening isn't giving any ground. She says he's doing _better,_ and God, swear to a nonexistent fucking God, the next time someone uses that word in reference to him he's going to hurl them to the floor and stomp on their throat until they stop moving.

No, he isn't. _Better._ He digs his thumbnail into a long scab on the back of a knuckle. He hates that word. _Better._ Hates it maybe just a tiny little bit like he was hating _her._ For being beautiful, and the wanting.

The wanting and never having.

Anyway, there's that hateful word, and then they _want to help him_ , more than they have been, they can't, _they don't have the expertise_ , they don't completely understand what happened to him.

Well, join the fucking club, _bitch_. All of them can join, there's no membership cap or anything. What happened to him is incomprehensible. What happened to him is that he got shot in the head and then he got left in the trunk of a fucking car, and then he walked here across three states and there is no way that he's ever found to make sense of any of that.

They don't have the _expertise_. So, okay. Teeth grinding. Not much but some. He doesn't at all like where this is going. Doesn't know exactly where that is, but he knows enough to know he doesn't like it. Doesn't like the terrain, doesn't like the lack of signs, and the road is tilting at a sickening angle.

Someone is going to come and talk to him. That's all. Just talk. He doesn't have to say anything he doesn't want to say. Mostly she actually just wants to listen.

Stares at Carol. Harder. The question is presented: Why. The fuck. Would she want to talk to him. Would he want to talk to _her._

Because it might help her understand what happened to him. And if she does, maybe they can help him.

So this is about _fixing him_ after all.

He continues to stare at her. Thumbnail digs and digs; feels scab peel away. Digs under, peels it further. Slow. Blood welling, gleaming little jewels emerging from his skin. The pain is a bright point of light in the corner of his vision. Focus on that.

There are so many things in this room that he could break. Including her. Including himself.

He doesn't say that he'll _talk._ But he doesn't say that he won't. And after a few moments of silence Carol gets up and goes to the front door, and Christ, this is an ambush. This wasn't about some time in the indefinite future. This is about now. Out here, exposed, and he didn't see it coming because, now with such horrified realization, he's been _trusting_ them. He trusted them from the beginning. At least in every way that matters.

Now he gets fucked in the ass.

Almost lurches to his feet and flees to his room. Instead - not really sure why - he stays where he is, and a woman comes in, and she's chubby and dirty blond and he's never seen her before and she's doing a very poor job of hiding that she's nervous, and Carol goes to the kitchen and as this strange woman sits down across from him he considers the merits of grabbing her by the hair and smashing her face through the glass top of the coffee table.

There's merit there, to be sure. But not enough to do it.

So she starts talking. Names. Okay, he mumbles his. Remembers it; it's easier to remember because people have been using it all the time, even if it tastes like ashes in his mouth. She's _Denise_ ; he forgets it ten seconds later because it's an unimportant detail and doesn't need to be retained, at least not in any conscious sense.

Names. Moving on to what she knows about him. Everyone thought he was dead, in Atlanta. He showed up very suddenly, very unexpected as it is when dead people do that. Rick, _Aaron -_ walkers _._ Killed, helped them. Had some trouble after, behind the walls. Got into a fight?

He looks at her and an icy and extraordinarily welcome tranquility steals over him, and he informs her that he could have killed both of those people with his teeth.

Would he have done that?

No hesitation. Yes.

Why?

They didn't matter. They happened to be there. They were stupid and slow and if they deserved to live he never would have gotten as far as he did.

Would he try to do it again, if he got the chance?

Doesn't answer. Shrug. _I'unno._ But there's the issue of _consequence,_ which there wasn't before, and this is not a difficult situation to analyze. If he hurts someone, they won't let him stay. If they don't let him stay, he's back out there in the cold and the wet and hungry and thirsty all the time, and walkers, always walkers, so never really sleeping. Never resting. Always moving. Fighting. Killing. And he could do that again. Thinks about the stupid, slow people. How easy to die. Doesn't want to be like that, _fuck_ no, if that's what this obscene place does to you.

He shouldn't be here. He doesn't belong.

But she's here. She is. Every night, right across the street. Lying down like he does. Tucked into the corner, her song faint in his ears _and we'll be good,_ reaching toward the window. Reaching for her. Moon gone bloody and burning in the space that separates him from her.

If he stays he can be that close to her. Keep being like that. Maybe closer.

Because he's fucking suicidal.

So no. No, he wouldn't try to do it again.

Why not?

There's no point. And also. Also. Pausing, carving a space out of the air. Holding it in his scabby hands, staring down at it. Truth goes in here, slots in like a puzzle piece. Why should he give it to her? How the fuck has she earned anything from him? But it's coming anyway. What he means.

Also, he wants to stay.

All right.

More questions. He keeps his eyes locked on his hands, tears slowly at his cuticles. Bites at them a few times, pulls away the skin. Is he eating all right? Shrug-yes. How about sleeping? More shrug. Sucking the blood off his forefinger. Is he getting along with Michonne and Rick? If _getting along_ means that he hasn't done something unforgivable or violent or unforgivably violent, then yes, he has. Carol? Carol is good. He'll admit that. He's not sure he exactly _likes_ her, but she's good. Carol helps him. Carol often seems to know what he needs before he does. Carol keeps forcing him to _try_ but apart from that she doesn't appear to want anything from him.

Is there anything he enjoys? Anything he does for fun?

 _Fun._ He silently mouths the word, blinks at her. Three fingers are now bleeding, and he's working a small bit of loose chewed skin between his teeth. _Fun._ Is fun what you call it when the pain stops? Is that what that means? Is _fun_ the joy of the reprieve that even sleep won't bring him?

What the fuck is _fun?_

Moving on.

More. Stupid, petty little digs for useless information. Mostly ignoring now. Answering in shrugs, grunts, single syllables. It all sinks into a low, vaguely hypnotic drone.

Until suddenly the drone is shrieking alarm bells at him.

His attention had been half wandering again, meandering from the slow destruction of his own hands to the scatter of light on the floor as the sun beams through the leaves of a tree outside, to a fly throwing itself ceaselessly against the window, as if at some point the glass might disappear. As if it might get out. Make it. But he's also aware that her nervousness has been fading and something else has been sliding into its place; she's not precisely _confident_ here with him, but she's calm.

And she goes quiet and her eyes bore into him and she asks these _questions_. These next ones. Seeing them coming at him like the distant headlamp of an oncoming train. No tracks to step off of. The world is the tracks and he's bound to them.

 _Does you ever see or hear things that no one else can see or hear?_

 _Does you ever think about hurting other people?_

 _Does you ever think about hurting yourself?_

This last asked with her gaze like a sniper's red dot on his twitching hands, his fingers oozing blood.

Does he ever. Well. Doesn't he. Doesn't he? Well.

Yes.

He doesn't answer her at all. He stares down at his boots. He watches bloody holes open up in the floor and beetles swarm out and over their feet, beetles except they're not quite beetles because they're crawling on rotting human legs, patchy with skin that's begun to drop off. Beetles with human eyes looking up at him, those eyes cloudy and rolling with death and gently reproving.

 _Does he?_ It's not complicated. There's one answer to all three and it just so happens to be three words. What could be simpler? What does he have to lose? This place, sure, but look out that big picture window, look outside, because did he forget that it's all burning? All flames? All screams?

And now he has these three questions. She already knows the answer to at least one of them. It's not a final exam. It's not a guessing game.

It's not _I Never._

The beetles are crawling up her legs, into her lap, over her breasts and up her neck, pouring into her eyes and throat. She opens her mouth to speak and vomits insects. He rips so hard at a cuticle that a strip of skin pulls free all the way up to his first knuckle.

Does he? Not sure he says it aloud. Not sure of anything. But does he?

 _All the time._

* * *

When Daddy was still around, Daddy would probably have termed this a _Family Meeting._ Family Meetings never take place because of something good. No one gathers around the kitchen table or in the living room like this when there's some delightful surprise to discuss. It just doesn't happen.

 _Family Meetings_ are always bad news.

This wouldn't be the first one they've had since they got here.

It doesn't happen at Rick and Michonne's place. Happens at the Greene-Rhee homestead. Just like the images and associations in her head and memory, they all crowd into a living room drenched in gentle early evening sun, distribute themselves on couches and in chairs. _Crowd_ might actually not be the best word for it. None of the outer ring of their group is here. None of the DC contingent is particularly concerned in this, nor Tara, and they all decided pretty unanimously that Sasha shouldn't be involved in this part either. It's not that her opinion doesn't matter, here, it's just.

Family.

And there's a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

Carol is absent - back across the street, ostensibly taking care of Judith, but Carol could take care of Judith perfectly well right here, so obviously that's not why she's missing.

Maggie and Glenn pressed together on the sofa. Rick in an armchair. Michonne leaning against the mantle, fingering a little glass horse. Carl some way removed, leaning against a wall. He's more than old enough to be here. And the reason for this meeting is a man with whom, for the present, he has to live under the same roof.

And her. In the other chair, by herself. Knees drawn together and her hands clasped on top of them. She's fascinated by a complex curling knot in the pattern of the blue-green-brown rug beneath her boots. Thinks that if she could reach down and really get her fingers on it she might be able to work it loose. Unravel the entire thing and leave it lying there like a shed skin.

Him by the fire, dragging it off a mudsnake. Stripping it all in one jerk. He could do that. She liked to watch him. Bizarrely, for a while it was one of the few things she liked, and one of the _vanishingly_ few things she genuinely liked when it came to him.

She tugs at the beads around her wrist and their _clink_ brings her back. Better than some of the other things she could do to get her own attention.

"-saw him today," Rick is saying. "Few hours ago. She still has to talk to Deanna. Then Michonne and I talk to Deanna, then we see what we see."

"How bad is it?" Glenn. Glenn holding Maggie's hand - subtle and soft, not the clutch of people huddled in a cold hospital waiting room dreading the diagnosis of whoever it is they care about lying behind those awful double doors where people go to be sick and to die.

"It's bad."

Two words like stakes driven into the ground, and everyone is quiet for a bit.

"Didn't give me much in the way of specifics. I mean, she wouldn't get all technical, it's not like I know what she knows." Rick swipes a hand down his jaw; what was light stubble is beginning to darken. "But yeah. There's…" He exhales. "There's a lot wrong."

"Bullet went through his damn brain," Michonne says, and it's in the flatly hard tone she uses when she's stating something awful, something she hates, so she's going to kick it out there with special force behind it. "We're not just talking about _emotional problems._ "

"No. No, we're not." The look Rick gives her is fathomless and completely unreadable. "And Denise says she's really got no way of knowin' for sure how bad that part of it is. Not with the equipment she has. So it's just… It's tough to know what to do with him."

Maggie leans forward, tugging her hand free and using both to push her hair back from her face - which is pale. Drawn. She hasn't been sleeping well either. None of them have. It's not just that he's _back,_ Beth thinks. Is pretty certain. And it's not just that he came back broken. What she's felt hanging over all of them is what Daryl said to her with that ghastly bestial tilt of his head.

 _You left me in a fucking car_.

"But what's actually going _on_ with him?"

Rick sighs again, shoots Michonne another glance. "He's… It's hard to explain. He forgets a lot. Sometimes seems like from one moment to the next. Not sure he always remembers names. He doesn't like a lotta light, people, noise… tends to keep to his room. He gets bad headaches - guess it stands to reason. He talks some, and most of the time he makes sense, but he hasn't really _connected_ to anyone but Carol. I don't think he feels safe here."

"Is he dangerous?"

Every eye swivels to Carl. Every neck pivots. Maybe he's leaning, arms folded over his chest, but he's standing straight, everything about him straight, steely frame, unbudging. Icy. His eyes are Rick's eyes, and that's true more and more often, and sometimes Beth looks at him and something in her twists, capsizes. Sinks. Rick was a softer man for a long time before he was beaten and burned into what he is now. But Carl?

Carl is starting early.

"Well? Is he?"

The question everyone has been wanting to ask, and no one has. She closes her eyes. She could have asked it. But she already knows the answer, and if she says it aloud there's no taking it back.

Rick shakes his head, once. "I don't think so."

"Does Denise think so?"

Hesitation. That hesitation is a critical error and it's piercingly obvious that Rick knows it as he clears his throat. "She's not sure."

"She's not sure," Carl echoes softly, and practically launches himself away from the wall. Stalking forward, clenched bone and coiled muscle. "Are you _kidding?_ So why is he back there?" He flings a hand toward the door, the street, the house beyond. "Why is he back there with _Judith?_ Why the fuck did you leave her _alone_ with him?"

"She's not alone." Not Rick this time but Michonne, very quiet. Very level. One of the few people now who can talk Carl down like this. "Carol is there." She pauses a beat. "You're not going to tell me Carol can't handle him."

Carl has stopped a couple of feet from the proper border of their manufactured circle, his jaw working and eyes narrow and no part of his face young. No part of his face sweet. No kindness, no mercy. The little boy she first knew at the farm is gone, and that's been the case for a long time, but every now and then she _sees_ it in a way she usually doesn't, and she thinks about Daddy and Tyreese and Bob and Noah,and she thinks about Rick and she thinks about Carol and she thinks about _Daryl_ and the ragged, gaping hole inside him where a good man used to be, and then she thinks about herself.

And she thinks _I don't think the good ones survive._

They don't. One way or another, sooner or later, they all die.

And it's not the bad ones who make it. It's _them_. Who let it go, the light inside them. Who gave it up just to keep walking. Left it in the road as shed weight because they couldn't bear to carry it anymore. It's not the good ones who survive, and it's not the bad ones either.

It's the weak ones.

 _Glenn and Maggie._

Yes, they're still here. But for them it's just a matter of time.

"I don't want him there." Carl is not presenting this for debate. "I don't want him under that roof. Not with us."

"So where would he go?" Glenn scans the room, brow furrowed - not alarmed, not yet, but Glenn cares, _cares_ because he always does _,_ and Glenn knew Daryl in Atlanta in the very beginning, and that counts for something. At least when you're Glenn. At least when you're still holding on. "We can't just kick him out on the street. And you're not telling me we're sending him back _out there._ "

"He can go back in the cell."

"He's _not_ going back in the cell." Rick sounding like an actual father is also something rare these days - louder, firmer, deeper and more of a solid thing shoving its way into the air, but it does happen. "How the hell is he supposed to get any better if he's in there? God's sake, Carl, that's _Daryl._ "

"That's not Daryl."

She didn't mean to speak. Didn't want to. Didn't want to say this, because what the fuck is the point? What does it change? It won't make him _more_ Daryl. Won't bring any of him back. And it probably won't change any minds. She sure as hell doesn't see it changing Rick's. And Carl…

Carl is the closest to it. But even he doesn't get it.

"It's not," she repeats softly. Her hands are still clasped, and now they're clutching at each other, nails digging in and knuckles pale. The words are for everyone, but she can't take her eyes off Rick. And she can tell he can't look away. "You want it to be him. You're hopin' it can be. You're hopin' there's still somethin' left of him in there. And sure, maybe you're right about that. Maybe there's somethin' left. But what's there now, that's not him."

Somehow she gets to numb feet, and on numb legs she starts toward the door. She can feel them watching her in silence, and the silence has a stunned quality. It fills her with sick laughter that she refuses to release. Of all the people who would say that. Of all the people who would deny him. They still don't understand what happened.

They still don't understand what happened to her.

She drags the door open and enters the oncoming night, leaving the house behind. Fireflies everywhere, rising like stars falling in reverse and nestling themselves in the bushes and trees. Down the street three kids dart across lawns and through hedges with mason jars, catching them and trapping them inside.

No, _don't._ Don't bottle up that little light. Don't lock it inside. As if she's cold, she wraps her arms around her middle as she makes her slow way down the street. This was her favorite time of year - this and Christmas. A transition point. A cusp. Not yet the sharper cold of January and February, not yet the relentless heat of July and August. _Was_ her favorite because she can no longer think of it that way. It's all those winking tiny lights trapped in those jars - glitter of sun off glass and clear liquid. It did taste disgusting, even in the second round, and the third and the fourth, but she didn't care because he was with her and it felt like maybe that weight they had both been dragging around had lifted.

She was wrong, of course. But for a while it was good again.

And he tried to make her smile. He was so exhausted and he was in so much pain, and later it was awful, but before that happened he joked about the state of the shack and tried to make her smile, and she saw the tiny lights rising in his darkness when he succeeded.

Good man. Gone now.

Or maybe she's just seeing what was always there.

She's approaching the gates, the place where he came in. Lights on the wall, people taking evening shifts. Talking, laughing. Gossip and their own jokes. Like everything is normal. Like everything is okay. Like the dead don't get up and walk, and sometimes come back. Sometimes follow you six hundred miles and at the end don't understand why they did that, why they did anything, and they're scared and in pain and you can't help them. Like that never happens.

Like everything is fun. Like everything is a big game.

 _I never got shot in the head._

 _I never died for a stupid girl who threw a tantrum with a pair of scissors._

 _I never got left behind by people I trusted._

He would be plastered by now. But as she stops and stares at the gates, thinks about what's beyond them, what she _knows,_ what she left a six-hundred mile trail through, a trail that he somehow followed, there's three more now, and they both have to drink deep and long, because it always works both ways in the end.

 _I never got out._

 _I never made it._

 _I never changed._

* * *

There are nights where she's not sure whether she dreams.

This is because there are nights where her brain displays a remarkable lack of creativity, and what she dreams about is exactly what happens: she lies in bed, the full-size bed that somehow seems so huge, and stares at the ceiling and tries to sleep and fails. She dreams that sleep won't come for her, that it's abandoned her, and she can't find it in the dark no matter how hard she looks.

She dreams - or doesn't - that she twists in the sheets for a while and searches vainly for a comfortable position, can't find that either. The sheets tangle around her legs and in frustration she kicks at them, ends up lying in a tangle of herself with her camisole rucked up around her breasts and her shorts pulling awkwardly at her crotch. The world outside is far too big and the world in here is closing in on her, tightening on all sides, folding up like a collapsing universe and preparing to crush her.

Closing like the trunk of a car.

She doesn't need to dream that something went horribly wrong somewhere and it should have been _her,_ should have been her brow with that neat little hole in it, her skull exploded in the back, should be her brain ruined now. Or no; she should have died. _No one_ should have survived that. She should have died and rotted in the trunk of that car, and he should be…

But it wouldn't matter. He would be like he is now either way. Maybe not quite this bad, but he would be broken. He would be ruined. Dead.

In his own way, he wouldn't have survived, because the good ones don't survive.

She couldn't carry him. She wasn't strong enough. But she imagines if it had been different, if he had carried her. It would have been horrible beyond comprehension, but he would have done it for her, he would have cradled her so gently against his broad chest and carried her away. He would have held her until he couldn't hold her anymore. He was strong. He wouldn't have let her go. He would have been dying too but she would have been safe with him.

Would have been.

 _Is he dangerous?_

 _He wasn't meaning to hurt you._

But is he?

She jerks herself out of bed; all at once there's hardly any air in the room and she's clawing what there is into her lungs, practically wheezing. She stumbles to the window and yanks the gauzy curtains aside, fumbles her fingers into the depression at the sill and shoves up the window.

Her room is also on the first floor, essentially in the same place as his, given that all the houses in the Zone were constructed according to no more than two or three separate plans. She wanted it here, for reasons she couldn't then articulate. Wanted it near the ground. At some point she understood: She wants to be able to run if she has to, and she wants to be unencumbered by stairs. She's never truly felt safe here, but up there it would have been worse.

Up there she would have felt the cold edge of danger in a much keener way.

Now she looks out at the silent world. Moonlight so bright it throws hard shadows. Nearly full; next night or the one after it will be. No lights on in any of the houses she can see. The Zone is asleep.

She's not.

Neither is he.

He's standing in the middle of the street. Just standing, utterly still. The moon should be highlighting his every feature, making him marble and jet, but it's not.

He's utterly black. He's a hole in the world.

Head tilted in that animal way, like he's coldly curious about something. Like he's trying to work something out. Trying to decide what to do. His hands are hanging at his sides. He's yards away, she shouldn't be able to see it, but she can and she does: His fingers are twitching.

There's no air here either.

At some point she blinks and he's gone.


	8. the sweetest price he'll have to pay

**Chapter 8: the sweetest price he'll have to pay**

 _Names like pain cries, names like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented, names forbidden or overused._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She finds out about it secondhand, because apparently she never knows anything for herself anymore.

Deanna is letting Daryl stay. Still probationary. She wants Denise to _work more with him,_ whatever that means. She wants to investigate any way they can treat this, whatever it is that's wrong with him, even if there's no way to know for sure exactly what it is and how bad it's gotten.

Denise thinks there are some options worth pursuing. She'll look into it. In the meantime Rick insists that he can handle it, with the help of his people, and so far that's been true. So far Daryl hasn't actually tried to hurt anyone else. He said some things to Denise that she seems to find concerning, but she also said that she's not sure he was telling the truth about all of it. Or he might _think_ he is, but he might be wrong.

She's fairly certain that he's hallucinating. He didn't talk about it, so how much is difficult to say.

Sitting on the wall with Maggie and her rifle on her knees, looking out at the light shimmering on the neat rows of plaintrees as they whisper in the quiet late morning. No walkers near the gates for a couple of days. Everyone has been enjoying the break but Beth isn't. It's making her uneasy. You get these _breaks_ and you pay for them later. Everything has a price now. The people here don't seem to grasp that, and that's very worrying, because these people are getting the biggest break she's ever seen, and when the bill comes due there's no way they can cover it all.

Until then, she'll stay. But she's keeping her gun close. More, now.

Because he was standing in the street with his head cocked like that, _looking at her,_ and what's there now is not Daryl. And she's not a naive little girl.

It would be wonderful to believe that he's truly not dangerous. It would be wonderful to believe that. But if he's not hurting anyone right now, that feels like a break.

And someone is going to have to pay.

"I'm sorry you've had to stay away from him." Maggie is picking at a splinter of wood on the platform, working it under her fingernail. It's a risky move. "I'm guessin' that hasn't been easy."

Beth shakes her head. "Ain't about easy. You do what you gotta do."

Maggie looks at her for a moment, and the moment extends. Beth doesn't look back. She doesn't much care. She's perfectly aware of the degree to which they've all been making a study of her, and she knows why. With Daryl, she's the wildest variable. Given his behavior, given what little she's told them about what happened out there on the road with him, they know that if a storm comes, it's likely to come from her direction. If he explodes, she's the thing most likely to be the trigger.

And at the same time they all know that she can't stay away from him forever. This isn't a big place and she's living right across the street. Sooner or later he's going to have to face her. She's going to have to face him.

Only question is when. And who will control it. If it'll be controlled.

"He's been doin' okay with Carl and Judith. Rick says, anyway." Maggie picks at the splinter again, works it halfway free. A breeze strokes over them, bringing with it the faint slickly-sweet scent of decay that they all barely smell anymore. It's become a feature of their sensory landscape. "Might be able to handle the rest of us in the next day or so."

"If Rick thinks."

"What do _you_ think?"

Because she hasn't talked about it since the Family Meeting. Hasn't said word one about him. Hasn't spoken his name, as if it's a magical invocation and by speaking it she'll give him license to appear. The rest of them have, not constantly but now and then - a bit tentative, because they're clearly still getting used to the idea that he's even something to be talked about in the present tense - and if they're studying her as closely as she senses, they'll have noticed her absence in those conversations.

Beth closes her eyes against the breeze and lets her feet dangle over the edge. Feels the solidity of the rifle in her hands, the grip. All the potential lethal ease with which she could wield it. It's never been much of a problem to kill walkers but it's less of a problem to kill people than she ever expected it to be.

It's not fun. But it's not really a problem.

She thinks that whatever he said, he was most likely telling the truth. She thinks that she looked into the nothing behind his eyes and she saw potentially infinite capacity for the commission of horrors. The desire to do so. The hatred of that fact. The hatred of everything. The hatred of everything he's become, because part of him is cursed to understand it and to do so fully. To remember what he was and to recognize what he is now, and to know that there was no reason for it. There was no logic or meaning behind it.

It just happened.

She thinks that she looked into the void inside him and she heard someone screaming for help with no hope left that help would ever come.

Locked inside. Trying to get out. Beating on the lid.

Weakening.

"I think people need to see him," she says softly, fingers stroking along her rifle. This morning she oiled it until it shone. "I think people need to really, really do that."

"We're gonna see him." Sudden hiss of pain; Maggie has gotten the splinter loose but in the process stabbed it into the quick beneath her nail. She shakes it, sucks at it and frowns. Beth watches this, impassive. Maggie had to know that was coming. Had to have a pretty good idea, anyway. It wasn't idle. It was conscious. She was committed. And she did it anyway.

Bill came due.

"That's not what I mean. You're not stupid. Don't act like it." She gets to her feet before Maggie can say anything, shouldering her rifle. Her shift is over. She's hungry. She has no idea what she's going to do after that but she'll figure it out.

She doesn't sing much anymore, but maybe Jeannie Rieger will let her play the piano in her living room for a while.

"If someone doesn't see him, he's probably gonna kill someone." She starts toward the ladder and she doesn't look back. "He might kill someone anyway."

So she sees him. That's not new; she always has. It doesn't much matter now.

She's keeping her gun close. She's made herself cold but beneath the ice it hurts so much. It hurts so fucking much, to do that. To see him and to know him and to do that. It hurts like she never thought anything could.

But she is.

* * *

The Boy doesn't like him.

That's fine. The Boy doesn't have to like him. He doesn't particularly care who likes him or not unless it affects him directly in some material way, and so far the Boy not liking him doesn't appear to be having any real consequences he can detect. It's only been a full day, but even so.

He's living in a house with someone who doesn't like him. Doesn't trust him. That's actually kind of nice. Everyone else seems to _want_ to like him, _want_ to trust him, which aren't attitudes that he shares regarding himself. So if the Boy doesn't like him or trust him, now he has some company.

He can steer clear anyway, for the most part. He stays in his room most of the morning and into early afternoon. No one bothers him. He dozes. Looks out the window. Looks at the tree right out there, red leaves the color of old blood trembling in the breeze. Watches the street. People now and then. Men, women, once a kid. About ten, maybe. Girl. Black hair in pigtails. Running, laughing after a woman. Young. Pretty.

All on fire and writhing and screaming but only for a few seconds. Then the sun is shining again.

Doesn't see her. Doesn't want to see her.

Wants to see her desperately.

He got very close last night. Got close to something. Thinks he remembers, anyway. Pretty sure it happened. Cool breeze, whisper of the grass against his feet. Rough solidity of concrete. The moon. Its light is gentle. Doesn't burn him. He can gaze up at the moon without blinking, without having to look away. The moon contains none of its own light. All reflected. Collected and shone.

How silent everything was. How he was a shadow moving through shadows. Even moving through light he was a shadow. Standing very still. Breathing and feeling the world breathe. No screams. No dragging bodies, no shambling corpses trailing strings of skin and ropes of loose gut. No swarms of flies, and the ground didn't belch worms. There was no fire. Not even the flames of her, looking toward where he knows she is. Then a second moon, hovering in the framed darkness of her window. Watched it. Could. Didn't blink or look away. Beautiful.

He was very close.

He could be that close again. If he wanted. If he got out once without them knowing, he could do it a second time. A third.

More.

Very strange, thinking of it as _got out._ As if they're trying to keep him here. As if he's some kind of prisoner. Hasn't seen much hard evidence of that. Would have been a major problem if he thought he had. He hasn't tried to go out. Hasn't wanted to. He doesn't like that world out there, all bright and clean and neat and crazily normal. Didn't like the way people looked at him in the short time he was actually there. Didn't like how insane it was, how none of it belonged there, how none of those bright clean people seemed to realize that. Didn't like looking at all of it and remembering Grady and how that went and thinking about the best ways to murder it all, because if he does that, if he murders basically _anything,_ they'll make him leave.

At best.

He's safer in here, behind these walls within walls. So is everyone else. And it's not like he misses any of it. Sun like a hammer, smothering heat, cold making his bones glass, walkers all the fucking time, always hungry, always thirsty, and no pills for his headaches. It's not like he thinks he's poorer for not being in it. Not like he feels any fucking nostalgia. So he hasn't tried to go outside.

But he kind of thinks that if they knew about last night, if they knew he went out alone and stood there and looked at her - if he even did, because he's not _completely_ sure that actually happened - they wouldn't like it. They wouldn't like that he did that. He shouldn't give a fuck about that, he really shouldn't, but he imagines it, if they knew - Carol and Rick and even Michonne - and he…

He doesn't want them to look at him that way. Like he fucked up.

He doesn't want to fuck up.

God, he fucking hates this. What happened to him. Second he walked in here, screwing himself. Caring about things. About them. Giving a shit about them, even if he doesn't _like_ them. Everything he has now is something he can lose. Better when he had nothing. Better when he didn't _want._ Didn't have all these names, all these memories, didn't _want_ to remember. Didn't want to know.

Didn't want to _get better._

He won't get better. That's just a word and it's bullshit, it's Rick's bullshit, Michonne and Carol's and that nosy cunt with her fucking questions. He won't. Just stop thinking about it. Just _stop._

Just make it stop.

But if he went to her.

She makes it worse, she makes it so much worse all the time, makes him hurt so _bad,_ but after Grady in the dark and the fire outside the walls she also made it better. She was all that did. She was all he had, little ghost of a flame and a song, a light to follow even if it took his sight. Followed her, found her now, and she's hurting him but maybe…

Maybe.

There are things she showed him how to do.

In his nest in the corner, in the shadows, he chews at his forefinger until blood seeps onto his tongue. Bites at the heel of his palm.

Gnaws at the inside of his wrist.

* * *

Late next morning he wakes up from a nap and there's a pack of cigarettes on the bed.

Sits up and stares at it for a while, caught in a stray beam of sun. Not initially sure what it even _is,_ though it's ringing all manner of bells. Shape and the way he knows it would fit into his palm, feeling the edges and corners. Remembering: Weight of it when it's full and lightness when empty. Smell of it freshly opened. White pyramid against that red, brilliant like cardinal flower. The word, which he can read but which doesn't matter. It's all the other stuff. Something small and slightly yielding between his lips. His teeth. Breathe in; not like campfires. Rougher, harsher. Not as deep somehow.

So clear.

(Sense memory is the strongest form of recall; he knows this even if he can't articulate it. These are the things he remembers best, the things that remain when everything else slips away. He doesn't cling to them, but of the elements of the time before that follow him around like unhappy ghosts, these are the ones he tends to resent the least. These are the ones which, sometimes, he nearly finds it in himself to welcome.)

Was it here when he went to sleep? He can't remember. Maybe it was. Sometimes when he's in here he doesn't pay a lot of attention to anything. Because this is his place, or he's making it his, so in here he can let go and drift in a way he can't out there. Something might change right in front of him and he might miss it.

Maybe it was here.

He disentangles himself from the sheets and shuffles forward on his knees, leans over the bed and picks it up.

Weight. Full. Opens it; doesn't think. Remembers how to do that. His hands remember.

Little white tubes. Plucks one out and turns it over and over between his fingers. Sniffs. Sniffs again, deeper.

Something else red in the periphery of his vision. Flash as he blinks. He focuses; hadn't noticed it before but it must have been there also.

He picks that up too and depresses the button and rolls the pad of his thumb against it the wheel.

Makes a fire.

Watches it. Watches it until his thumb is burning; hardly notices. Fire. Fire spreading, on the bed, over the floor, licking up the walls all hungry tongues. Crash the roof in. Eat through his door and pour through the hall like a flood, wash over Carol and the Boy and the Baby and anyone else in here, curl them into charred little nothings on their knees in prayer to a deity who delights in their pain. Spread out onto the porch and to the next house, blacken and crisp the grass, next and next and next, whole place burning for real. People staggering out, trying to run, skin sloughing off. Steaming blood, eyes gone, fat dripping like a goddamn barbecue. Falling and convulsing and at last still. Towers of fire arcing toward the sky. Smoke to blot out the sun. He can walk through and it won't blister him, won't blind him. Breathe it in. Fill himself. All dark inside, all soot and ash.

Go to her, where she is. Her hair on fire. Dancing gold. Screaming a final song as it consumes her. Watch and listen and take her when it's over.

 _Take her._

He flicks his thumb up and releases the button and it's gone.

* * *

So he goes to the back porch and he smokes one.

The back porch isn't so bad. Shady. Secluded. Not far from one of the walls. No walkers beyond, at least not that he can hear. He sits on one of the lower steps and he smokes the cigarette slowly, working his way through it like something he needs to solve. In its way it _is_ a little like a puzzle. A tangle of meanings and associations and they're all rushing at him all at once from all sides. He doesn't feel attacked by it, but he's near to feeling overwhelmed.

Doesn't put it out. Keeps smoking.

It's good, is the thing. It feels good. Buzz in his veins, gentle. Somehow soothing and making everything sharper in his head. Might be imagining. Might not matter.

Creak of the door and footsteps and then a voice behind him. Rick. Great. Says he left the pack. Saying he hopes he _likes it._ Thought he might. He liked it before, and they were getting harder to find. Found some on a run, scooped them up. There's actually a whole carton if he wants more.

Eyes slipping closed as ash sprinkles the flagstones.

Is he supposed to thank Rick? Is that what this is? Is he trying to get that out of him? What he hasn't been given since this whole thing began? No _thank you._ No appreciation. Well, no, why the fuck should Rick get any? Far as he's concerned, frankly, Rick _owes_ him. Owes him for all that shit he followed Rick into and didn't want to and did because he wanted to _make Rick happy,_ didn't want Rick to make him go. Wanted someone to follow. Needed. Direction. Comforting. Trained. Tricks. Sit, roll over, beg.

Kill.

He bites down on the filter until he almost chews it off.

Rick sits down on the step above him. Doesn't say anything else for the moment and that's a mercy. Can see him without looking, mind's eye - leaning over, elbows on his knees, long fingers clasped. Unfocused gaze. Seen him that way before. The farm, evening. Looking at him, thinking maybe this cop asshole wasn't so bad. Thinking maybe this was someone he could stick with. Thinking this might be a good man. Thinking his life to date was pretty short on good men. Thinking he was tired of being lost and being scared and being shat on because he would do just about anything to not be alone.

Just about anything to not be left behind.

He fills his lungs with smoke and imagines a chest swollen with pulsating bloody tumors. All right, then: Thank you, Rick, that's very thoughtful, but unfortunately this isn't going to kill him quite fast enough for his own liking.

So then Rick is talking, because luck is a fickle whore.

It's good, having him here. He knows it's weird, he knows that, but it's good.

Grunt. Considers not answering at all. It's not really worth an answer. But here he is, doing it anyway, because that's how things appear to be going these days. He doesn't want to do something and then he does it.

So actually this is kind of just like the Good Old Days, isn't it? Simpler times. Women always wore dresses. Everything was worth a nickel. No one locked their doors at night.

Another grunt. The Boy doesn't like him.

Carl will get used to it. Carl - _Carl._ That's right. Carl. He heard that name before, didn't he? He's been hearing it for a while. Hearing it and it slips away again. Not sure why. Doesn't matter. _Carl will get used to it._ No, he won't, because Carl isn't a fucking idiot and Carl isn't blind. Carl can see things clearer than just about anyone else here. Maybe even Carol. Sure as hell clearer than Rick. It's good that way. _Someone_ should have a clue.

Someone besides her.

She looked. She looked and she saw. Always has. Did. Burned all through him, right to the bone. Little happy golden sun in his arms. Little flame, and for a fragment of time he held her and she laughed and it was like fire bursting his heart open. Splayed and scorched. She can look at him all she wants and here's the thing that suddenly slides, treacherous, into his mind: If she tells him he made it…

If she tells him that. She's not an idiot either. She sees him, and she said he made it. She said that.

No.

(It's actually not true that the triggers of his mental wandering are impossible to predict. Not entirely true, at any rate. Some things do capture him more than others. Some things are much harder for him to resist, when they make their appearances in the clumsy, stumbling progress of his thoughts.)

Anyway. Rick is still talking.

Rick is saying that he's sorry.

Which is loop-throwing for a few seconds. Sorry for what? Doesn't actually ask; waits. Spares him half a glance; gaze is still fixed in the middle distance. A cloud of gnats shimmering in a patch of sun near the wall. Sorry about everything. Sorry it happened. When he saw it, saw the blood, saw him fall… When he found out Lori was dead. Voice low. Rough at the edges. That's the only other moment he can think of that was as bad. That hurt so much. There's no way to make it make sense. There's no way to apologize enough. No way to make it right. If they had known… But _if_ is bullshit.

On that they can agree.

But he survived. _You did, Daryl._ Survived, came home to them. Doesn't know if he can help, doesn't know if that's possible, but he wants to. Whatever's needed, he wants to. It's not like he expects things to be okay, because…

Because it's so hard to make anything okay. Because they all leave pieces of themselves out there. Because the truth is that in the end, people can come back but no one ever comes back whole and that's just how it is.

But they all have each other. Even after everything they've been through, _everything_ you've _been through,_ they still have that. And that has to be worth something.

Then Rick shuts up and he stays that way, and there's just the distant sound of children playing, the buzz of an engine, crows in the trees.

All crows. The trees are full of them, the only bird that exists now. Carrion. Observing everything with their oil-black eyes, waiting for everything to die.

He taps ash onto the flagstones, inhales and blows a stream of smoke. So who did Rick get, while he was gone?

Confusion. Patented Rick Grimes Head Tilt; doesn't need to see that to know it's there either. Who did he get… For what?

 _To suck your dick._

Silence now.

Well? Who'd you get, Rick? Were they good? _Good as me?_ Suck his balls too - _really_ get to work with their tongue? Let him fuck his way into their throat, let him come all over their face? Lick it all up? Did he get ever someone new for that? Ever get someone to fill that particular hole in his day-to-day and hey, isn't that some hilarious phrasing?

Don't you think, Rick? Isn't it all just really fucking funny, how life works out?

Turned. Actually looking at him. Meeting his eyes, those _fucking_ eyes, he could pop them out with his thumbs and that might be a fine thing to do. Did it once before, might like to try it again. And what he sees in them, what he can tell he's done.

The rush of power is both nausea and intoxication and his head spins.

Rick says he doesn't mean that. Says it very, very quietly.

Not looking away. It's boiling up inside him, all seething, bubbling, hissing as it eats away at his walls. Thinks he might vomit it all over Rick's fucking lap, steaming and reeking, everything he's been carrying around since Rick fucking Grimes handcuffed his brother to a roof.

Could say a lot of things. Could tell Rick that he doesn't get to decide something like that. Could ask him how the fuck he dares to say that. Could say he knows _exactly_ how Rick dares to say that.

Could tell Rick to eat shit and die.

Doesn't. Looks down at the cigarette in his hand. Almost burned down to the filter. Done with it, pretty much. Thank you, Rick. That was so considerate of you. That was such a nice surprise. Yes, he's very appreciative. Isn't that what Rick wants? Isn't he responding like he's supposed to? Isn't he playing according to the script to which Rick would obviously like to return, where he knows his place and keeps it and everything is where it belongs?

He pinches the butt between his thumb and forefinger and doesn't take his eyes off Rick's face as he slowly grinds it out on the corner of his hand.

Doesn't feel anything.

Rick reaches for him. Grabs for him. Eyes have gone awful, gone blazing, shining, hard to look at now, and he twists and grips Rick's wrist and wrenches it sideways, _almost_ far enough to break it, lunges upward. It's pouring out of him now, bile and pus. He's infected. He's infection. Dripping it into Rick's eyes and mouth as he pins him to the steps and looms over him and bares his teeth.

Saw Rick rip a man's throat out. He remembers sick, lurching horror. He remembers cold understanding. Acceptance. These are the things we do when we have no other choice. These are the things we become when we can no longer be anything else.

Saw Rick rip a man's throat out and now he thinks about giving Rick a taste of that. A fuck of a lot more than a _taste._ Side of his neck exposed. Teeth in soft meat, jerk up and sideways, blood spray - hot and stinking and sweet. Go back in for more. Chew. Raw human flesh is slightly rubbery in texture and surprisingly difficult to tear free.

He knows this so much better than Rick now.

Rick thinks he's not a threat? Actually thinks that? Show him, then. Show him, shove it right in his face and grind it like a cigarette, since he won't see what the Boy sees. Since he refuses, since the shit he's so full of is crusting over his eyes. This is the threat he's not. This, right here. Fuck you, Rick. _Fuck_ you and fuck this place and _fuck everything,_ let a monster into his home and he should die for being so stupid. They should all die. The Boy, for all his perception. Michonne. Carol. The Baby. Take the fire Rick gave him and kill them all.

Except Rick is crying.

Not hard. Barely anything. Just tears gathering. Glistening. Bright.

Hard to look at.

Blinking, trying to keep his focus, knowing he's going to fail. Rick isn't fighting him. Letting himself be pinned, tense but not pushing back, not even trying to protect himself. Idiot. The fuck is he doing? Doesn't he _see?_ Doesn't he see what he's done, what he's brought into his home and under his roof, what he's tried to be kind to?

 _It's alright._ So soft. Every syllable is a slap in the face worse than the crater opened up in his hand. _It's alright, Daryl. It's okay._

 _You're okay._

Every muscle seizes and he hurls himself away like Rick has tried to crush his fucking balls. Stumbles back, drops the pack, drops the lighter and it clatters on the stone. Leaves them. Doesn't want them. Doesn't want _any_ of this. Foaming rabid dog, snarling _it's not alright. It's not alright. It's never alright. Look at what you did to me, you stupid arrogant prick. Look at what you all did. I'm all pieces and I'm still out there. And you say it's alright. You said we get to come back. You liar. You fucking liar._

 _I'm not better. I'm not going to_ get _better._

 _There's no such thing as better._

* * *

Blank for a while.

* * *

In his room. He doesn't remember returning but here he is, sitting on the floor with his back against the door, so he must have. Afternoon sun. It's not hitting him directly but it hurts his eyes anyway so he closes them. Another storm is coming; he can feel the lightning sparking between his temples. Sometimes he imagines it cutting through the ripped seam the bullet left in his brain. Playing along the inside of his skull.

Smoke in his mouth, and when he opens his eyes there's a weeping hole in his hand.

That happened, then.

Fuck you, Rick. Fuck you. Fuck you for everything, everything you did and didn't do and everything you're doing now. Digs his jagged thumbnail into the hole, _hard,_ and seeping clear fluid runs red.

Sitting like this, just like this, except his back was against a car. Early morning. Damp, cold. Everything smelling like death but they survived, because they did what they had to do. Saw just how far down that could take you. Sitting just like this, hurting so much and so tired and sad but he found them, found his way to them, so in that moment he bore the pain gladly. It was worth it. It was worth something.

Her absence ripped him open and did so constantly, not a single event but an agonizing ongoing process, but this much was still worth something.

 _You being back with us here, now. That's everything._

 _You're my brother._

He gouges at the hole until blood drips onto the hardwood. He can't cry.

 _You're my brother._

He doesn't have a brother. It's just him now.

* * *

Moonshine.

The storm came and went. Carol gave him the pills - either didn't notice the increased damage to his hands or didn't mention it - and he slept for a while. Slept through dinner. No one came for him. Woke up in the dark and when he turned on the light there was a tray again, and the food was cold but he ate ravenously because he was ravenous. Then he took stock of things and realized that it was late enough for the house to be silent. Sleeping.

He wanders it with bare feet, silent as it is. A shadow moving through shadows, yes. He can be that. Through the kitchen with all its gleam and shine, the dining room as he glides his fingertips across the table's slick surface. Past the downstairs bathroom, which he'll use but whose mirror he won't ever look into. The orderly living room with all that brightness gently blanched in the moonlight.

Carol here, on the couch. Knit blanket pulled up to her chin. She's strong and he knows it, knows she can be very dangerous when she wants to be, but she looks so small now, like this. Face turned to the side, features relaxed. She looks both old and young, and she looks fragile.

Breakable.

He stands and watches her for a while.

Into the front hall. To the door. It unlocks with a _click_ that won't wake anyone, and he's through it and out into the cool still night.

Moonshine. This has been true ever since he left Atlanta: While she's the sun, he feels profound kinship with the moon and its shine and what they drank that night. There are all kinds of reasons for that, not least because in the end he's lethal. But he's also clear, even when he's pitch black. Smoke black. Clear like nothing, like water that runs away and is gone. He's the most disgusting thing she's ever tasted. In the second round she might convince herself that he's better but it's a lie.

But he's not sure this is such a bad thing to be.

Moon so bright that night, the night they set the fire. The heat reddened his face but when they turned away and melted into the dark together the air was cool and it soothed. Everything was soothed. All of him. She burned him before but he wanted that, needed it like that cool soothing air, and when she gave it to him, granted him that ineffable favor, it was like she opened up his lungs and he could finally breathe.

Later, in the shelter of low trees. Still moonlit in spite of the shade. Watching her sleep. Keeping watch but also _watching her_ and thinking he had been so harsh to her, he had been so cruel, and he never wanted to do that again. Wanted to be gentle from now on. She deserved that. She deserved so much better than he had given her.

So much better than he could ever be but he would try to be better anyway. He would try. For her. All for her.

She was all he had left.

Watching her and aching to touch her. Just to see if she was real. Just to know that he didn't create her in order to torment himself. Almost did but then he didn't because it felt wrong, to do that without her permission. Even if it was all he wanted. Even if he didn't want anything else from her - God, no. Sort of thought about something vaguely related to that and didn't get any further.

Not even certain what it was.

 _Oh, girl._

This place isn't safe. Everyone thinks it is, but it isn't. It's burning and sooner or later they'll all realize, but by the time they do it'll be too late.

It already is.

He has to see her. He has to make sure she's there. Real. Safe for now, even if there's no true safety to be found in a place this insane. A place like this that doesn't belong.

Crosses the street, nothing more than a shadow. Surely a shadow couldn't do any harm. Surely a shadow is allowed to be up and about in the moonlit darkness.

Like before, rough pavement and then more grass - so pleasant against the soles of his feet. He pauses, stands very still and closes his eyes and tilts his head up and thinks it might not be his imagination that he can feel the smooth fingertips of that pale light stroking over his face.

(Even in the midst of nearly constant pain, there are moments of genuine and unadulterated pleasure. He remains capable of that. He is unsure about whether or not this is a bad thing. Whether or not he should consider it yet another curse.)

Her fingers. She did touch him. Not much but some. More than he knew what to do with. People don't just _touch him_ but she did. Not even like Carol, and with Carol most of the time it had almost been okay. Actually been okay for real there, toward the end.

But not wanted. Or not wanted like _that._

Like this.

All of his life since Grady has taken on the inevitable quality of a nightmare, so as he approaches her window he's not surprised to see that the curtains are open, because they would be. Maybe she left them that way for him; that would be like her. Tiny kindnesses. Easy things. It's easy now to step up to the window - no shrubs or flowerbeds to block him or make it more difficult to hide his track - and look inside and see her bathed in the moonlight, her bed not far from the window, because of course she would want to be near light of any kind.

Her room is simple. Bedside table, glass of water, lamp. Dresser with a few little nothings scattered across its top. Mirror - he'll forgive her that. He'll forgive her wanting to see her own face, because who wouldn't? No doubt she doesn't hurt herself anyway. Plush armchair, and he can see her curled up in it, knees drawn up to her chest. Book open face-down there, title he can't read. She wrote in one of her own; he remembers that very clearly. Always thought that was strange. Stupid, then he simply wanted to understand it and never could.

Her bed and her. She looks so small in it, smaller than Carol ever did. On her side, hair spilled across the pillow, gold gone silver in the moon. Face so pale - all her skin so pale, her bare arms and her strong legs exposed because at some point she kicked off the sheet and it's tangled around her ankles. His gaze sliding up the swell of her hip. Camisole pulled up a bit, showing her belly. Small breasts hardly there at all.

She's thin. Maybe too thin. Thin as she was when they were together. Even in a world of plenty, she hasn't filled out. She hasn't gotten soft. She hasn't gotten comfortable.

He's proud of her.

She's so pale, though. Bloodless. Could be marble, carved and smooth and hard, slick like the tabletop. Or she could be dead, dead and still fresh. Maybe still warm, when he would touch her.

Not turned. Not turning. He'd make sure of that.

He'd do all kinds of things for her.

He's been careful to tread lightly, to leave as little spoor as he can, but now he forgets himself, forgets everything except her, and he raises a hand and presses it to the glass. As if he could press himself inside. Melt silently through and stand at the foot of her bed and watch over her. Keep her safe.

He walked six hundred miles to find her. He shouldn't take any chances now.

She's so beautiful and he loves her so much. He never hated her. That was a lie he told himself because he couldn't bear it, the heat and the light of his love. But he can feel it now under the gaze of the moon, and maybe it's better. Maybe with her it can be. Maybe there is such a thing after all.

He can't get inside. He shouldn't. Like that night, not without her permission. But he can be here and he can watch her until it's time to go back, until the moon is setting and the dawn less than an hour away. Drift back to his nest as silently as he left it, curl up and find some sleep of his own.

Christ, he's not a threat. Not to her. Never. Never hurt her, never again. He's nothing but she's everything and in her light maybe he could be something. He came this far for her. He survived.

He made it.

He sleeps and he dreams of her, so pale. So fresh.

Still warm.


	9. left with a trace of all that was

**Chapter 9: left with a trace of all that was**

 _Names of endurance, names of devotion, street names and place names and all the names of our dark heaven crackling in their pan._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She looks at the handprint for a long time.

The sun beams past the porch roof of the house next door and catches it just right, makes it semi-opaque. Makes it look like frost. In indirect light it would be hardly noticeable, but the light isn't indirect, the light is _very_ direct, and when she opened her eyes it was the first thing she saw.

She looks at it, and she focuses on her breathing.

She won't be afraid of him. She'll see him, but she won't be afraid.

But he was here. He came across the street and he stood outside and he _watched her._ For how long? She knows it wasn't a quick peek. It couldn't have been. Ten minutes? Half an hour? An hour?

All night?

Any of these seems reasonable. The longer, the more likely. She knows from what Rick has said that Daryl often appears to struggle with maintaining his focus, with paying attention, and it seems like his mind frequently wanders or makes long jumps from subject to subject without much in the way of obvious connection or logic. The logic is probably there, but it wouldn't be logic any of them could understand. But he _could_ maintain his focus, under the right circumstances. She's sure of that.

Very possibly he could focus better than any of them.

He stood out there and he watched her, and she sincerely doubts his mind went anywhere. His mind - like his gaze - was locked on her. He told her to _get the fuck out,_ but that was then, that was a week ago, and he's had a lot of time to think about her and her proximity, and she remembers his eyes when he first saw her in that hallway. Subtle, she was probably the only one who noticed, but she remembers.

Like he had been denied air, been locked in a vacuum, and all at once he could breathe again.

No danger in that. He was never dangerous then. Not even drunk and enraged was he a genuine danger to her. She was never afraid of him then, either. Some of it was frankly that she knew, in those moments, that he was like an animal who would attack even more viciously if he sensed fear - he wouldn't want to, he might not even _mean_ to, but he would. He wouldn't be able to stop himself. But he never would have truly hurt her.

Not like that.

And after, he never would have hurt her at all. She saw how he looked at her, especially when he didn't think she knew he was looking. The gentle wonder. The completely innocent fascination. He was like a child in those days after the fire. And yet he wasn't; she could _feel_ him growing, reaching for light, like a stunted seedling at last touched by the sun.

She thinks he could have watched her sleep then - almost certainly did - and it never would have bothered her. What else should he have done? She was _there,_ and so was he, and she's not stupid. She wasn't stupid then either. She wasn't naive. She couldn't have afforded to be.

She knew she was all he had.

That wouldn't have gone away, that fascination. That wonder. There's no way the bullet could have carved it out of him. It has to still be there. But that's not _him_ anymore, so she doesn't know what _it_ is. What it might have become, along with the rest of him. All that terror she saw. All that pain.

All that rage. That hate.

Probably it was always there. It's just all exposed now, like shipwrecks left behind by a receding tide. Jagged rocks and broken bones. And whatever control he had over it, however much the essential sweetness in him mitigated it, softened it, covered it over…

All gone.

She gets up and walks to the window and presses her own hand to the glass, lines her palm and fingers up with his. Hers looking very small. She remembers that too: Taking his hand in the cemetery and weaving their fingers. He stiffened but then he squeezed. Careful. Tentative. But he did. The size of that hand compared to hers, the thickness. The strength. Safe.

She was so safe with him.

She closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the glass. The sun hits her lids, makes the world the rich red of fresh blood. She's been an idiot. She can't do this. Rick said she needed to stay away and maybe in those initial days that was true, but it's no longer enough to keep her gun close, and anyway, what the fuck kind of solution was that? What did she actually think she was going to do?

If she drew on him, regardless of what he was doing, it's entirely possible that she would only confuse him.

And he's been screaming for help, he was screaming for _her,_ and she's just been _over here,_ like she's not here at all. Like he's not there.

Maybe Denise will _work with him._ Maybe Denise is far more qualified to do something than she is. Maybe she's being an idiot now too, maybe this is a horrible idea; she was certain before that when she stopped in the street, knowing that he could see her, all she was doing was hurting him. But she can't do this anymore, either. Not to him. Not when she could be doing something else.

She won't be afraid of him. She refuses to do that. She throws some clothes on, drags a brush through her hair and pulls it back, and crosses the street.

She takes his knife.

She takes hers, too.

* * *

Rick comes to the door. He's tired, more tired than she's seen him in a while, and that's saying something. Not just a lack of sleep; she can tell that instantly. Sure, there are hollows under his eyes, but it's more about his eyes themselves. The hollowness inside them, behind them.

Something happened.

"I don't-"

She doesn't let him finish. There's no point. "I have to see him."

Rick shakes his head. "Look, Beth… I don't know how good an idea that is. Yesterday we had a…" He closes his eyes briefly, pinches the bridge of his nose. "He blew up. It wasn't as bad as it could've been, he didn't really hurt anyone, but he did."

"I don't care. I have to see him. You know we can't just keep puttin' it off." She gazes up at him, unwavering. Hard as she's learned to make herself. She's damned if she'll explain this sudden need. That's her business, only hers, and if this is how Rick is thinking right now, telling him about the handprint definitely won't improve matters. Her eyes flick past him to the front hall. In a fall of sunlight she sees Michonne leaning against the side of the living room doorway. "There's never gonna be a good time. And the longer we wait, the harder it's gonna get."

Rick says nothing. Crosses his arms, regards her. It's abruptly difficult to read him. He can do that at will, pull down the shades even to her, and it can be disconcerting. The weariness is still there, but she can't see past it.

"You said he wasn't meanin' to hurt me," she says softly. "Either he wasn't or he was."

"Just 'cause he's not meanin' to doesn't mean he won't."

A flood of cold and extremely unwelcome relief. He gets that much, then. He's seen that much. It's not everything, but it's a start. More than that; he's halfway there. "I know."

Another pause. Michonne hasn't moved. Her face is stony. Beth pretty much knows what Rick is feeling about this, shades and all. Michonne is sometimes more of a puzzle, but a week ago it was piercingly clear that she wasn't exactly thrilled about this whole thing. Though she also didn't at all seem ready to hurl Daryl back out into the wilderness.

This is a house divided against itself, by one broken man. That's its own problem and it might be a big one. In any case it's an obvious one.

"I'm not leavin'," she says, just as soft. "So you can let me see him or you can make me a fuckin' sandwich and a cup of coffee. Up to you."

He blinks at her. The shades have blown in, and all at once she sort of wants to cry. What she's said, _how_ she said it, how it hit him. The words aren't really so much, but now and then she's brought face-first up against the fact that she's not who she was before she got thrown into her own trunk of her own car, and she won't ever be. That she's carrying around many more scars than the ones on her face and her wrist and all the other little ones she's picked up along the way. She's not that girl, not the girl who sang and talked about hope and faith like she believed it, because Daryl wasn't the only one who fell in that hallway.

Daryl isn't the only one who changed.

On the porch that night she said she wanted to. Wished she could. _Like him._

God, she wants to fucking cry.

"Alright," he murmurs. He stands aside, and she moves past him and into the bright front hall.

Michonne's eyes don't leave her. They narrow very slightly. Beth can be hard, but Michonne is a wall of solid steel and sharp as her blade. "This is stupid."

"It was stupid before and I lived through it."

"That doesn't mean anything." She pushes off the white molding of the doorframe and steps forward. At Beth's back, Rick is still and silent. "You haven't been living with him. You haven't seen how he is." Her gaze shifts to Rick and returns to Beth, boring holes. "Yeah, he didn't hurt anyone yesterday. Except himself. And he just about broke Rick's goddamn wrist."

"But he didn't," Rick says quietly. "He could have. He didn't."

"First time for everything."

"It wouldn't be the first time." Suddenly - only it's really not very sudden at all - she's as weary as Rick is. There's no other reasonable way to feel. There can be other things in addition, but weariness is the only rational baseline. "He's probably done worse. Way worse. We all know it. He's been out there alone for weeks, _how he is._ "

"And you wanna see him."

"I have to."

"He's on the back porch. Or he was last I checked." Rick steps past her. He's moving a little faster than he has to, and he doesn't look at Michonne. "I'm comin' with you."

"No. Just me." She pushes past, faster than him, and heads down the hall with her hand on her knife. She won't be afraid. In truth, she doesn't believe she needs to be. Maybe the handprint is actually what makes her so certain. He watched her, and that was all he did. And he's watched her before. Watched _over_ her.

She shoots a glance over her shoulder. She feels old. "I'll take that cup of coffee anyway."

She'll never be that girl again, no. That girl is months dead.

That girl rotted away to nothing in the trunk of a car.

* * *

He's on the back porch.

He's smoking. Sitting hunched over, elbows on his knees, head bowed. Half-gone cigarette dangling loosely from his fingers. She can't see his face, can only see his back, and once again in spite of the bright morning sun he seems lost in shadow, even given that he's in the shade. He appears to be bathed, he's wearing moderately clean clothes that aren't completely ragged at all the edges, but it doesn't matter somehow; he still looks like he did in the cell. She doesn't need to see his face to be sure of that. To _see_ it.

He's still what she saw.

His hair got so long. For some reason that's what she can't stop staring at. His hair got so long and he won't let Carol cut it.

If there's a spot at the back of his skull where it doesn't grow - and there pretty much has to be - she can't tell.

She _can_ tell by the tension in his shoulders that he knows she's there. Probably was aware of her before she even came out; the inner door was open, leaving only the screen door, and the odds are better than average that he heard her voice echoing through the hall. If he's paying attention.

He's paying attention.

She closes her eyes for a few seconds, bites down on her lip. Bites hard. Maybe this was stupid. No _maybe;_ it was _stupid._ Stupid doesn't mean _bad idea,_ and that's what she's not sure about, and that's what she thinks maybe it was. Not because this might end badly for her.

It's not herself she's worried about.

Tension. It's gathering, not fading. He's winding up. This isn't even new; she's seen it before. She saw it in him when he was sitting across from her in the shack and _staring_ at her, after she said what she said, staring at her and biting the very tip of his finger and winding up until he uncoiled into a slow-motion explosion. It hadn't been her fault, not the size of the yield anyway, but she had been the trigger.

Back then he had still been in possession of his sweetness, and his inclination to be gentle when he could. The tide hadn't yet rolled out. And it had still been that bad.

What Michonne said. It's only hitting her now. _He didn't hurt anyone yesterday. Except himself._

That wouldn't be new either.

"I can go-" she starts, and he doesn't even let her finish the third syllable. She completes the consonant, but he cuts her off at the vowel.

"No."

He half turns his head. She can see his nose and the edge of his cheek, his chin. Nothing more. The barest traces of a face. The word was rough, very quiet, and it was trembling the slightest bit. It doesn't sound like a declaration of denial. It doesn't sound like he's trying to stop her.

It sounds like he's begging her.

"Stay." He hesitates. The cigarette trembles along with his fingers, as if that quivering is making its way from his vocal cords into the rest of him. "Please."

This is more than she expected. If she's honest, and she basically has to be. "Are you sure?"

He ducks his head. Otherwise nothing.

So she goes to him, and she steps down, and she sits beside him.

And neither of them says anything for what feels like a long time.

She's about to break the silence when he gets there first. He's still wound tight but it doesn't feel like it was during the game; she can discern that now. It's not rage. It's fear. He's terrified, absolutely on the ragged edge of panic - and he's holding on. He's _trying._ She can't see much of his face even from this angle, can't make out his eyes at all, but she can see his mouth and the thinness of the seam of his lips, the set of his jaw. He's never looked like this when he's angry. Not that she's ever seen.

Then he speaks - in that same low, rough tremble - and she knows.

"I'm sorry." He lifts the cigarette as if he's going to take a drag, but he doesn't. He just stares at it with those eyes she can't see. "'bout what I said." He takes an enormous, smokeless breath. "I'm sorry about that."

If he's taking a breath she's releasing one, and she's doing it with her entire body. Every cell is exhaling, and it's a breath she's been holding since he ran at her, screaming, and Rick took him down. She said it wasn't him, and she wasn't completely wrong - so much of him is just _gone -_ but _this is him._ This, right here. Mutilated almost beyond recognition, but it's _him_ , and she exhales and then she can't draw a breath at all. She simply sits there, empty and numb with her throat an aching knot and her tears threatening to blind her.

"It's okay," she whispers - somehow she finds the air - and he turns his head and she sees his eyes and it's almost too much. She can't cry, she _can't,_ because if she starts she genuinely isn't sure she'll be able to stop, but it's so nearly too much. It's a fist slamming into her breastbone and shattering it inward, spearing her heart with its shards.

His eyes are totally dry, but they're not pits. They're not dead. There's light in them. But it's so faint. He's still fighting, but he's so tired, and she thinks about six hundred miles of agony and terror and unbound rage, bewilderment, loneliness beyond comprehension. He was never someone who could be alone and he has been, for _weeks,_ and he was alone in every way that matters.

And now he's here, and she can't imagine what it must be like to be so tired.

She can't help it. She blinks and her tears spill over, stream down her face and drip hot from her chin onto the backs of her hands. She manages another hoarse whisper, and it's horrible and she's so scared of hurting him but she can't help it at all.

"I missed you."

He doesn't say anything. He just looks at her. For a few seconds there's an awful kind of blankness, the light goes out, and ice joins the shards of bone in her chest because what if she was wrong, what if she was wrong _again_ , but then he's reaching up with his free hand, and she has time to catch a glimpse of fingers chewed horribly raw, cuticles ripped and torn and skin stripped away, before he's stroking his thumb slowly across her cheek and through the track of her tears.

"Don't."

He always hated it when she cried.

She shouldn't be able to stop. It shouldn't be possible. But she does, or at least she beats back the rest of it, and as his hand falls away she swipes at her eyes with a kind of anger and drags in a shuddering breath through her clenched throat, and then another and another. She didn't imagine the dark blankness, because when she can see him clearly it returns, but only for a second or two and the light is there again. The rest of his face…

The fear remains. He's also confused. Fighting it, like trying to flail his way through a gauzy curtain, but not entirely succeeding. But far more present than both of those is a third thing, and that thing is something she has no name for.

Except she's seen it before. She saw it in that fucking hallway.

Like he can breathe again too.


	10. just one step at a time

**Note:** Want to thank people who have been sticking with this. I know it's been a rough ride so far. Wish I could tell you it'll get easier, but hopefully it'll be worth it at the end (have narrowed things down somewhat as well as realized an unexpected twist, but there's one crucial thing regarding which I remain unsure).

Personal note: I didn't mean to give Daryl what amounts to dermatillomania/dermatophagia, but I did, and given that I have it/them, that kind of means a lot to me. I think there's canon support for a mild form of it; he's often biting/chewing at his fingers.

* * *

 **Chapter 10: just one step at a time**

 _His voice on tape, his name on the envelope, the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge behind you, the body hardly even makes a sound._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He manages to keep his gaze on hers for another few seconds. Then he has to look away.

She can tell he _has_ to. It's not a conscious decision. He looked at her for as long as he could, until something in him couldn't bear it anymore. He's withdrawing to protect himself. At least he's only withdrawing this one thing, because he's still _here._ She can feel it like a field of thrumming warmth that extends from him to her. Connection.

God, this is so much more than she thought she would get. Today. Maybe ever.

Except now the silence is stretching out again, and she wants to say something, wants to fill it - _needs_ to. He's speaking to her. She doesn't want that to stop. With a frantic kind of exhilaration, she thinks she might do anything to keep it from stopping.

She does have the option of simply saying what she means. Being straight with him and not overthinking it. It always worked fairly well with him before, even when it didn't. Even when it blew up in her face. That much was never a bad move, regardless of the wreckage in the aftermath, because in the end it always ended up being the thing that needed doing.

She can't do anything else. And he doesn't deserve anything less.

"I'm sorry I've been… stayin' away."

Single shake of his head. He lifts the cigarette to his lips and inhales deeply, length of exhalation to match. Once again all she can see are parts of his face. Nowhere near the whole thing. "You had to."

"We thought…" _Rick thought and I agreed because to be honest I was thinking it the second you called me a bitch and a stupid little cunt and told me to get the fuck out._ She looks down at her own hands, her tears a drying sheen across their knuckles. This is, in so many ways, also so much _harder_ than she expected. In addition to being so much more. "...it might be better. For you. It might be better if you had some time."

"Had time," he says softly. She has no idea what he's looking at now, where his visual focus is, and for some reason that bothers her deeply. His eyes are lost in the shadow of his hair and he could be looking at anything. His eyes could be closed. "Had a lotta time. You know how long it takes to walk six hundred miles?" He snorts something that might be the hollowest possible laugh and tilts his head in a way that indicates a glance in her direction. "Actually you do. Right?"

This doesn't feel like a step backwards. An edge has crept into his tone, something sardonic and bone-dry, but it's familiar, and there's nothing about it that feels malicious to her. Nothing about it that feels like a flashing danger sign. If anything there's a bizarre kind of comfort in it, because right now he sounds the most like _himself_ that he has since he came through the gates.

She rolls an awkward shoulder. "We didn't walk the whole way. Had some vans." She pauses a beat. For some reason this part feels even more difficult, and maybe it's that the walking distance feels paltry in comparison, or maybe it's just that they were so close to falling then, and a significant percentage of her had _wanted_ to fall. Had been looking for the right place to do it. "Quit on us about seventy, eighty miles from here."

He grunts. She's half expecting some kind of biting retort to that, how then she really _can't_ possibly fucking imagine the timeframe he's talking about, can she, how of course she _would_ have a goddamn _van_ while he slogged the entire way on foot, of course that just figures.

But there's just that grunt, his head still down. Then, "Takes a long fuckin' time."

He's lucid. Or he seems to be. Lucid and sounding like him _,_ and if she doesn't keep hold of herself she's going to start crying again.

She weaves her fingers together, and as she does she sees his again, loose between his knees, and she sees what's happened to them, what he's _done_ to them, and she still doesn't know exactly what Michonne meant when she said he _hurt himself_ , but this doesn't look like damage done in a single event. Some of the raw, skinned places are old. Some are sort of healing. There are scabs. Some of the scabs look freshly picked open.

This was a process. It took him a while to do this to himself. And it's ongoing.

What else has he been doing?

"What happened? At Grady?" She doesn't want to ask, but she needs to do this too. This is probably something she'll never fully understand, not least because _he_ almost certainly doesn't fully understand it, but she needs to come as close as she can. What he's been through since, she has to know as much of that as she can too - needs to _see him_ \- but she has to know where it started. How.

Maybe a little of how it all went so wrong.

He stiffens again. This time it's worse. This time it's the stiffening of mounting defenses. The cigarette wobbles in his mouth as he bites down on the filter.

"A lot."

"Can you tell me?"

He shoots her a look. There's something almost furtive about it, and it wrenches at her. He doesn't want to tell her. If he doesn't want to tell her, if he actively wants to conceal it, it's bad. Thus far he's had few reservations about conveying information regarding the atrocities he's allegedly committed. He doesn't apologize for them. He never seems ashamed of them.

Rick hasn't said, Michonne hasn't said, but she knows how he would do it. He would shove them in people's faces. He would wield his own crimes like weapons, ultimately against himself. Hurting them for daring to care about him. Hurting himself for daring to be something that anyone cares about.

Now he doesn't want to tell her.

A sudden breeze whispers across the porch, tugs gently at her hair. Tugs less gently at his. Tugs it aside from the left side of his face, the side she's sitting on, and with a cold lurch she sees it: a little moon-patch high on his brow, barely a depression, mostly just the gray of scar tissue.

But not only that. Part of it is scabbed over. Not much of it, a sliver the size and shape of a fingernail's edge, but it's there and it's fresh.

He's been picking that open too.

"You don't have to." She twists at her own finger, her hand. She didn't wear her bracelets today - it's something she's come to care less and less about - and when she turns her left wrist to the light her eyes trace the thin line over her veins. He's seen it. She never explicitly showed it to him, never formally invited him into that part of herself, but he knows it's there. He used it against her. "You don't have to tell me anythin'."

"I woke up." Once again he barely lets her finish. Head still down, chewed fingers worrying at the cigarette. "I don't remember." He falls silent, and she can practically see his wheels furiously turning, spinning in the mud. He's trying so hard. "There was… Screaming. You." He turns his head further to the side and his eyes flick very briefly to hers and then away to nothing at all. "After… I dunno. I dunno. I just woke up."

"How did you get out of the car?"

"Don't remember."

"So how did you know about it?"

Yet another pause, and it's different. Or it's more like before. His fingers don't stop moving but the quality of the movement subtly changes, and so does the tension in his shoulders. His breathing.

His wheels have stopped spinning; he has that information. He's just not sure whether he can give it to her. Or whether it's something he's willing to do.

As it turns out. "Edwards."

She already knew. Couldn't be anyone else. There's no other way he would have made it. All the same - in a sense she can't explain - she's surprised. Edwards wouldn't owe him anything. Quite the contrary. It's likely that Dawn's death ultimately didn't change very much where the day-to-day operations of Grady Memorial were concerned. Resources would be scarce. A living Daryl Dixon would have had every reason to be a major problem for them. Very possibly they would pump resources into saving him and he would die anyway. Or be so brain-damaged that he might as well have done.

But she knows why. Edwards wasn't a fool. He was a lot of things, many of them nothing to be proud of, but he was far from a fool and extremely far from oblivious. He would have seen her on that floor. How she was holding the dead man. Holding on. Clinging. He would have known.

He _did_ owe _her._ Or he would have felt that way.

"He saved you."

And he's just gone.

She knows instantly that it was the wrong thing to say when his head snaps around, eyes narrowed through the ragged curtain of his hair, only one fully visible - and not blank. Blank would be better, blank would be a comfortingly neutral nothingness, but this is exactly what she saw in the cell. Black holes in his head. Lightless. Empty.

Rationally predatory. Completely insane.

"He didn't save me." He pauses, jaw working, and two of her knuckles crack as her hands clench in each other's grip. She got more than she expected; _this_ is what she actually expected, at least if things went bad, but now she knows there was no way to be ready for what's truly happening right in front of her. This isn't like the cell, because what she saw in the cell was _all_ she saw. She came in and he was already gone. She didn't lose him there.

She didn't watch him slip away from her. She didn't watch him vanish.

"He didn't save me," he repeats softly - a totally different quality of softness. All the tenderness of a wolf. "I took out his eye."

She swallows and it sticks in her throat. Closed up again, clenched as her hands, aching dully like the memory of a bruise. She won't be afraid of him. She won't.

But she should be.

"Did you kill him?"

He shakes his head, slow, and she doesn't feel a single iota of relief. She knows better. "Killed the rest."

 _Oh, God._ "Them…" All her tears are gone. Frozen over. She abruptly realizes hasn't blinked in what feels like a while. "Everyone?"

She hadn't made any real _friends_ there, no. Not except for Noah. Wasn't about disliking people - though there was plenty of that - and it wasn't about wanting to be on her own, which she never felt. Not then. Not like now. She liked being around people and she liked it even more when she could be helpful, useful, contribute in a way that she could see. She fed on the energy of it. In its way it was power.

Not Grady. Not being _used._

But it wasn't even about that. It wasn't about resentment. It was simply that she wasn't going to stay. She was going to _get out._ Maybe it was cold, maybe it was slightly unlike her, but she figured there was little point in forming any more attachments than were useful to her. Little point in getting close.

Except she had liked so many of them anyway. Of course she had. Of course she wouldn't have been able to help it. Prisoners just like her, many of them worse off, scared and sick and desperate to get free and terrified to go outside at all, confused and lost and just trying to survive. All in the same shit together, and if she could have somehow taken them all with her when she went, she would have done it.

Sick people. Scared people. Weak people. And Daryl is looking at her with those horrible dead eyes and telling her that he spared Edwards - sort of - and _killed the rest._

But again, that single shake of the head. "Cops."

And it hits her what that means. When he said _the rest_ she thought about people in beds, people shuffling around in scrubs. For some reason she didn't think of uniforms and badges, and she didn't think of training and guns. All of them with guns. And Daryl Dixon waking up brain-damaged and frightened and dazed, maybe in a coma for a while - wouldn't surprise her - and God knows how much worse he was when he hadn't had a chance to do much healing, as bad as he is now, and he faced down all those officers with all their guns and he killed them.

She saw him. She thought she did. _Saw_ him, saw the bare outlines of what he might be capable of, saw the lethality coiled inside him like a pit viper.

She didn't. She didn't see anything.

It's possible that she's looking at the most dangerous man she's ever encountered in her life.

"Did they try to keep you there?" She keeps talking, rummaging vaguely for questions, because she doesn't know what else to do and she can't look away from him. Her tears are still drying on her face, she can still feel the gentle passage of his thumb across her cheek, and with those dead, empty eyes he's pinned her like a butterfly to a mounting board.

Yet another head-shake.

"So why?" She sounds far more desperate than she wants to, and beneath all the other roiling emotions she can't hope to name, she's irritated with herself. She _knew_ it was going to be bad. She should be stronger than this. "If they didn't… Why'd you do it?"

He cocks his head - puzzled animal in the cell, standing in the street and watching her through the dark. "They took you."

 _Oh._

"Daryl…" Soft. She could drop this, and in fact that would probably be the wisest move, but very little she's done here has been wise in any way, shape, or form, and there's really no reason to change tracks now. "The ones who took me… They were dead. By the time you got there. They were already dead."

Not that he would have known.

"They _took_ you," he repeats, and there's an edge of insistence in it - not exasperation, but as if it's important for her to understand his logic and he can't quite tease out what's tripping her up like this when really it's all so simple. "Don't matter. All of 'em. They took you. Kept you. They didn't get to live."

A hospital full of sick, scared, weak people and a one-eyed Dr. Steven Edwards. She wants to laugh and it's horrible and absurd - she wants to laugh _because_ it's horrible and absurd. No part of this has ever _not_ been absurd, and it began when she watched the bullet blow out the back of his skull and it's only been getting worse since then, absurdity piling onto absurdity. This conversation - here on the back porch of a normal house on a normal street on a warm sunny day in early summer while the dead roam outside the walls and humanoid animals rip each other to pieces over scraps - is by far the most absurd part of the whole narrative, the apex, and she bites her lip and prays that he'll take whatever he sees on her face for simple unease.

In his current mental state he's likely to regard making someone uneasy as normal and healthy and safe.

But then it's real unease, and in fact it's _worse_ than unease; an icepick rolls its point down the knobs of her vertebrae and it takes everything she has to keep from recoiling when he lifts his hand again and cups her jaw, thumb tracing along her cheekbone. The touch is still gentle, still careful, but it's not hesitant, and his eyes are no longer dead. What's in them is like the light from before.

If the light was shining straight out of the bottom of Hell.

"They took you away from me," he breathes.

She says it. She doesn't think. She can't. If she thinks about it she won't do it, and if she doesn't do it she might very well lose this completely. She smells sour blood and decay and clammy sweat and she thinks about him standing outside her window for hours upon hours, _watching her_ with his hand pressed against the glass, about his innocent wonder and fascination and what it might become if a bullet ripped through it, and if she stops to think any more she'll be afraid.

And if she's afraid he'll know. Sense it. Close in.

She doesn't think he'll mean to. _He wasn't meaning to hurt you._ He'll just _do_ it, because even if no one can see it, there's essentially a _W_ on his forehead, and God knows if it'll ever come off.

So she'll do what she has to do.

"I know you were at my window last night."

He collapses.

It's all internal. She watches it happen through the window of his one visible eye; the infernal light fractures and folds in on itself, and what's left behind is what she saw to begin with when he looked at her, when he said he was sorry, when he wiped away her tears. The fear, and the fear is flaring like a fire abruptly soaked in propane. He blinks and jerks his head, looks down and away.

"I didn't…" And he says nothing else. Just trails off. The cigarette tumbles from his ruined fingers in a tiny puff of ash when it hits the flagstones, and he doesn't seem to notice.

She wonders if she hit him. If that's what she just did. Because he's dangerous, but she has power here that she doesn't yet fully understand, and it's power over him like she's never had.

Never wanted.

"I didn't," he murmurs again, and it's not denial. He's not trying to cover it up. He was always shit at lying to the extent that he ever even tried, and she doubts very much that he has that capacity now. It's something else, and it aches in his voice. Fear but not quite. Shame but not quite. Confusion, always. He's probably always confused now. Never certain of anything.

Always a little bit lost.

"Daryl." She's reaching for him at the same instant that he lifts his left hand to his mouth, teeth capturing his thumb - the thumb that stroked through her tears - and she sees it on the side of his hand, between the knuckles of his thumb and forefinger and further back toward the bony knobs of his wrist.

It looks like a crater. Like something interstellar smashed into him and left a hole. The skin around it is angry red and slightly swollen, and the wound itself is only partially scabbed over and oozing what thankfully looks like plasma and not pus. Maybe it had been closed but it's opened up again, and she's sure he did the opening and on some level meant to do so.

And it looks very fresh.

 _He hurt himself,_ Michonne said. And she looks at the relatively neat edges of the thing and then down at the cigarette smoldering on the stone, and she knows.

She's moving before she can stop herself, reaching for him and closing a hand so lightly over his wrist, and he spasms and twists away from her, his whole body drawn in and facing her with his breathing coming in shallow pulls and eyes wide and terrified and sharp as knives.

 _Fuck._

"Okay." She holds up her hands, scoots back a little. "I'm sorry. Okay. It's okay, Daryl. I won't."

He shakes his head, twice and forceful nearly to the point of violence. "No, it's-" He ducks his head, grimacing, and it's like she can see it through his skin: He's beating against the inside of the cage that is himself, hurling himself at his own walls, clawing at them. After he came through the gates he tried to claw his way to her, and he never stopped.

And she doesn't know how to help him.

"I'm alright," he mutters under his breath, and she doesn't think he's talking to her. "I am. I'm alright."

She doesn't move. He doesn't look at her. The foot or so between them is spreading itself into a chasm. It's entirely possible, she realizes, that this is just how it's going to be from now on. Moments where the sun breaks through for him and he can see the sky, followed by the clouds rolling in again. Fog. Storms. Thunder, lightning. Darkness.

But he was there. He _was._

 _He still is._

"I asked Rick for some coffee," she says, pitching her voice low. Smooth. "I'm gonna go in and get it. Do you want any?"

He shakes his head, but it's less violent. It's not really violent at all. He's slumped over his knees, his hands hanging loose, and once again - now that she's seen it - it's difficult to take her eyes off his mutilated fingers. It must hurt to touch anything. It must hurt no matter what, and he won't let it stop hurting.

She's not going to be afraid of him; she's also not going to start crying again.

She gets up and climbs the couple of steps to the top, and she's gripping the door handle when he turns at the waist and looks back at her.

The sun has broken through. Not much, but it's there.

"Come back." His left hand twitches, the fingers squirming against each other. "I mean… Not now. After you get the coffee." He swallows. "I can be alright."

She bites down on the insides of her cheeks. What he's really saying.

 _Don't leave me. I'll be good._

"I know you can," she whispers, and she shoves herself into the house.

* * *

Rick is alone in the kitchen, leaning against the polished granite countertop and drinking his own cup of coffee, and staring generally into sunlit space. He glances up sharply as she comes in, and with the way his eyes move over her she gets the distinct impression that he's scanning for injuries. Even though if anything _had_ happened, he would have heard it. Heard it and come running.

She opens her mouth and he nods at the microwave before she can speak. "Didn't wanna interrupt."

The coffee is warm enough to not need any further zapping - and also she doesn't much care - but she pauses in front of him, looking up at him as if they're exactly the same height. She hasn't truly _looked up_ at him since they left Atlanta. "How long were you listenin'?"

"Long enough to make sure he wasn't gonna try to take your head off." There's no evasion in it, nor is there any sheepishness. He was doing what he does, and he's confident that she'll understand that and have expected it. But then his voice drops and softens, and he takes a long breath. "Long enough to make sure it's okay."

"It's okay." She hesitates. Once she gave out hugs like candy. She dispensed them freely and with a low-key everyday joy. Those points of contact, warmth, connection. Bonds strengthened. Family taught her how to _make_ family and she did in every way she could.

Now she reaches out and touches his arm. It lasts for a couple of seconds and then it's over.

"Thank you."

He shrugs, looks down. He's fucked. He's fucked and he knows it. He argued his way into something he can't possibly win, and he's arguing to stay in it. Fighting. He'll have to be physically removed, if he's removed at all. Since this all began, Rick Grimes has been fighting his way into worst case scenarios, and by now he's _charging_ into them, waving a gun and a machete and declaring preemptive victory.

But he still knows he's fucked.

She leaves him and goes back outside.

* * *

Daryl doesn't appear to have moved. But this time he immediately looks up at her when she sits back down, and she can see more of his face. It's not just his hair; she keeps thinking that it shouldn't be possible, but it literally _is_ as though he gathers shadows in and releases them, puts them on and takes them off. He's uncloaked himself. Or he's started to do so.

His eyes shift to the mug in her hands and up to her face. "All the coffee is that instant shit now."

"Yeah, it is. It sucks." She gives him a small smile as she raises the mug, and if he doesn't return it, he also doesn't look away. "You go with what you got."

He nods. You do. This is a truth he's probably better acquainted with than most of them.

She's staring into the mug's gritty brown depths, searching for some other way to reach for him since Grady doesn't seem like a place to which they should return - a job for Denise, maybe - but he does the reaching for her, clears his throat and gazes intently down at the bright, freshly painted wood between them.

"Your window… I just needed to see you. Make sure you were… safe." He raises his eyes, and the fear has at least somewhat receded. "Just see you. That's all."

So he knows - or some part of him does - how what he did might be interpreted. That's good.

That might be very, very good.

"It's okay." And she means it. It is. Because she gets it and she _believes_ him; he needed to see her. He was slowly suffocating; he needed to be able to breathe. He wouldn't have done anything more.

This time.

"It's okay. Just…" She rests the mug on her knees, fingers wrapped around its uneven green ceramic body. It's one of those slightly upscale deals that's supposed to look handmade and might even be so but not for any other reason than for people to feel good about owning something handmade. "You can see me. You can. Just please, Daryl… Please don't do that again."

Because dancing around it is only going to make it worse. And if he's going to respond well at all, this feels like a promising moment. But sudden pain edged with mortification washes across his face, and her chest tightens.

"Sorry."

"I said it was okay. I meant it."

He ducks his head, biting at what remains of his thumbnail. "Did I scare you?"

"No." She can say it without lying, and of that she's immensely glad. And when he looks up at her again, relief is faintly smoothing his twisted features. Though pain remains.

"Good."

"You can see me," she repeats. She's making the decision as she says it, and she knows it's not going to be a popular one. But dammit, it's _hers_. It's for her to decide. If anyone else has a problem with it they can take it up with her and she can suggest that they go fuck themselves. "You need to, you come across the street and you see me. Not just look. Talk to me. I mean… I'm not always there, but-"

He nods, still gnawing at his thumb. "You pull guard duty." The gnawing ceases and the thumb lowers a bit. "You on the wall?"

She hasn't once seen him really _outside_ since he got here, and she has no way of knowing how much of that day he even remembers. But he'll have observed, and he'll have retained anything that could help him stay alive. "Yeah. You saw the walls."

"Comin' in. Hard to miss." The wan ghost of a smile passes across his face. It's more like something she herself is imagining rather than something that's actually changing his expression in any way. The trace of something he once gave her. "This place don't make no fuckin' sense. It don't belong here. No one belongs here anymore."

Ice trickling down her spine. She keeps making these connections in her head, and then the connections make themselves right in front of her.

No one heard them say much, because everyone involved on both sides was dead very quickly, but what did get said was marked and remembered. Because no one truly believes it's over.

"No." Sip of coffee. It's something to do with her hands. The coffee is cold and bitter and awful, and she swallows it like a thing she deserves. "It doesn't."

"The walls," he murmurs, staring out at the one in front of them. All at once he's distant, but she doesn't think it's confusion, or another one of those patches of blankness. It's thoughtful distance. He's pulling back to a wider view. Processing. Mulling. "Everyone's trapped here. Locked in." He closes his eyes, his hands once more lax and softly curled in his lap. "Sometimes it's all on fire. All of it. Everybody's dyin'. No one gets out. No one makes it."

She should be arguing, even if only as gently as she can. She should be telling him that he's wrong. It's all right. It's not on fire. No one is trapped. Everything is okay. Everything is going to be okay.

She won't insult him. Neither will she lie aloud to herself. Not here, not now.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, and it's not jerky or overtly rapid but it's like she blinks and he's there, like there's no transition, and she gasps. He doesn't seem to notice. He just _looks_ at her, and he hasn't gone anywhere and the Hell-light isn't shining, but what she sees there inside him turns that trickle of ice into a spike.

"This place is gonna burn, Beth. They always do. They always burn." This time the smile isn't a ghost. It's there, clear, and it's so tired and so sad, and she knows that she's looking at someone who took a bullet in the head and came out shattered and ruined and also _wise_ in a way she'll be blessed to never understand. "And then we always run."

She doesn't mean to say what comes next. She keeps saying things and doing things and not intending to, and that's fine, because when she first walked across the damn street she knew that thinking too much was going to be her enemy, and this has gone better than she ever dared to hope, because generally hope is bullshit.

But maybe not always.

"Yeah, well." She rolls a shoulder and gives him a reiteration of her own smile. It feels like his has touched hers, reshaped it. Not that she needs much help being tired or sad. But there's this. "We got out together once. Maybe we'll do it again."

* * *

She came.

She doesn't stay much longer. He doesn't say a lot more. Storm is rolling in, thunder in the distance, and when it gets too close and he asks her to go she seems to understand, seems to get that it's not that he doesn't want her to stay, except he really doesn't want her to stay. He doesn't hide pain - there's no fucking point, why should he? - and she can probably see it anyway.

And he can ask her to go. _He can ask her to do that._ Ask her. Just _ask her._ And she'll go and it's okay because he'll be able to see her again, because she _came to him_ and she _told him_ and he believes her. She wasn't just saying it to placate him. She wasn't just saying it to keep him away from her window. She wasn't saying it to get something from him. She said it. Meant it. He can see her.

 _See her._

Later, thinking: He did. Not blinded. Not burned. She touched him and _that_ was too much, it was like a fiery whip across his hand, but he knows she didn't mean to do it - sweet girl, she never would have meant to do that. And she forgave him. She forgave him everything. She was patient with him and he made it. He came through it and it didn't rip him apart. He didn't bleed or vomit poison into her eyes. He didn't burst open like a sore and soak her with his infection.

He didn't hurt her. Those things he was thinking about doing to her, he didn't do them.

He touched her and she let him.

And he was bathed in light.

(A memory, even now very strong and very distinct: Standing outside the shack with her in the expanding wave of fallout, having exhausted his rage and turned away, and then having finally found the crack in the dam of himself and broken it open - _maybe I could've done something_ \- when she seized him and bore him up even as he was crumbling, she pushed him forward with the impact of her body and he reflexively raised his face into a beam of light. It should have blinded him but it didn't, and he blinked up into it and saw things for which he did not and never will have a name. Much later he was certain it was the moonshine or the rage-delirium or a fault in his usually reliable recall or some combination of any number of variables, but at the time he could have sworn that the sun was shining from the other direction. That the light into which he was staring couldn't have been sunlight. That it must have come from somewhere else.)

Lying in the curtain-made dimness with the storm grumbling in his head, eyes closed and rocking on a sea of nausea so persistent that it's really more _tedious_ than anything else, that's what he comes back to. Orbits. _He touched her._ It's a revelation. It shouldn't be possible. He should have burst into flames. Or she should have killed him with a look, killed him for his presumption, blackened his bones and turned his flesh to ash. He touched her and she was warm, warm to her core with the beat of her heart and her blood in rivers beneath her skin, and she allowed it and it was all right.

He would have drunk her tears like rain. Head back, eyes closed, hands out and palms up. Exulting. Exalted.

He curls his aching hands against his chest and feels that warmth still beneath his fingertips. Not his own. He has none of his own. He's the moon and he has nothing that she doesn't give him. Today she gave him warmth and light and he'll shine.

All through the rest of the storm, through the afternoon of the Boy's glares the two times they cross paths and Rick's sadly puzzled eyes and Michonne's inscrutable looks and Carol, Carol asking him about it and for once not immediately picking up on it when he tries to hint without grabbing her and screaming at her to _back the fuck off_ that he would like to be _left alone…_ All through it, he's still warm. So it's all right. It is.

All through the sleepless moonlit night, gazing out the window at where he knows she is but where he will no longer go, he shines.

* * *

 **Further note:** For anyone who cares/is interested and didn't catch it, some of Daryl's dialogue is indeed drawn wholesale from JSS/6x02. I didn't expect this aspect of the story to be more than a passing reference but I'm glad it's become a bigger feature.


	11. hiding backwards inside of me

Okay, so here's where I go back a bit on what I said about medical accuracy.

For a variety of personal reasons - some of which I'll be discussing here - I've actually started actively trying to get some things right. Which means that we're at a point where I can't be all I DON'T CARE SO DEAL and instead I have to apologize in advance for the stuff I will inevitably and probably already have gotten terribly wrong. In terms of trauma/mental illness and its treatment, I'm drawing on research I've done but also heavily on my own experience, and I am neither a medical nor a mental health professional. I'm just someone who's been embedded in it for a while from the actual illness side of things (I have cyclothymia and all kind of fun OCD-related things going on).

I'm probably being ableist as fuck all over the place. I'm really trying not to, but yeah. So I'm sorry in advance, and if I get anything unforgivably incorrect please let me know. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 11: hiding backwards inside of me**

 _Your name like two X's like punched-in eyes, like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter, your name with two X's to mark the spots, to hold the place, to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Denise visits, next day.

Remembers her name. He did retain it after all. The certainty that he does in fact retain just about everything is continuing to increase in solidity and intensity. He knows much more than he knows. He has no idea whether or not he should and indeed does find this a comforting idea.

He has her name, and when he sits down across from her in the empty living room, cups of that absolutely shitty instant coffee in front of them, he doesn't say it but he holds onto it as if it confers a kind of power.

Never cared. Not about names like this, attached to people like her, people whose places rest significantly down the hierarchy of real and meaningful and worth his attention. Never gave a shit about them. _Never_ in the sense of since Atlanta, which was a beginning as total and decisive as birth. It never mattered.

 _It does matter._

Yet another sunny day. So many of those, and less obscured by rising smoke. The sun catches Denise's glasses and makes them partially opaque. It catches her dirty blond hair and makes it less dirty.

He hates her but only in a distant kind of way. Mostly he's fine with her as long as she doesn't make herself into a problem, and merely being here doesn't - yet - count.

She asks how he's doing. Shrug. He looks down at his hands, which after an hour of pleading and prodding he allowed Carol to wash, and to which she's applied a healthy amount of antibiotic cream and then bandaged. It's deeply irksome. He wants to bite them, wants to pick at himself. _Needs_ to. Not being able to has settled a clenched fist of low-level panic in his core, nothing that's actually freaking him out yet but which he knows could do so under the right circumstances. Was it this bad outside the walls? He can't remember. Couldn't have been, because it seems like it would have been a tremendous liability; he doesn't like his own body at all but Christ, he understands that he wants to avoid infection.

(Many of his thoughts now work in terms of the concept of infection. The passage of the bullet was that first wound into which the bacteria settled, and it hasn't ever healed. The rest of him became inflamed from the brain outward, fiery and swollen, and he's full of pus and one step from the spread of necrotic tissue. He exists on the verge of whole-souled gangrene. He has always - that relative _always_ \- believed that eventually he will be just another shambling corpse with pieces of himself rotting away, living and decaying in a perfect reflection of the interior of his mind. That much, he's certain, is comforting, because honesty remains the best policy.)

(But _she_ has complicated things. As she always does.)

He's alright. He's doing alright. He said he was, the other day. Said it to himself, and that was kind of new. People have been telling him he is. Rick is full of shit, but Rick…

How are things with Rick?

He doesn't want to talk about that.

Did something happen?

He jerks his head up, glares at her. Glares as if he could strangle her with his eyes alone. She already knows. Rick will have told her all about it. Or Michonne. She's fucking with him, she has been since she sat the fuck down. Doesn't like that, it's been happening a lot lately. _She_ hasn't been fucking with him, not as far as he can detect, but the rest of them are on the hairy edge.

But he won't do anything. He won't. Chew the bandages off his hands before he does anything, chew out the howling rage inside. He didn't explicitly promise her but he does in his heart, does every second; he won't do anything. He won't do anything to make them send him back out there, and now he won't do anything that would land him back in that little room and place her out of his reach. The range of that unbelievable touch she's allowed him.

What were we talking about?

Oh, yes.

He doesn't want to talk about that.

Anyway. Bares his teeth. Okay, he won't _do_ anything but he'll make his desire to do so clear, and what's making him want to. What's fueling that fire. He'll be straight with this bitch even if she won't be straight with him. She knows. She knows exactly what happened. How about she doesn't piss in his mouth and tell him it's whiskey. How about she doesn't do that.

How about she doesn't because he's thinking a lot about trying to yank her intestines out of her belly with his bare hands, which he knows he can do. Knows from experience.

Would he do that?

Sigh. No. He would not. Glare again, sharp. But he wants to. Stop making him want that. Fucking _stop it._

Okay. Nods. She's not scared of him. He notes this with additional irritation; if she's not scared of him that's an upper hand he doesn't have, and if he hasn't been able to scare her yet he's not sure what more he can do short of actually attacking her.

No. That's not true. There are a lot of other things he could say. He hasn't come _near_ to exhausting the arsenal.

Yes, she knows all about it. Or she knows what Rick told her. What did Rick tell her? Here: That he said some very unpleasant things. That he burned himself. That he tackled Rick, almost broke his wrist - _didn't_ break his wrist. He was angry at Rick. Why was he so angry?

Looks away into the light. Pattern on a blanket tossed over a trunk by the window, zig-zags in blue and gold. He doesn't know why. He doesn't know.

Yes, he does.

Is this her saying it? He's not certain. It's confusing. He does know. He's insane but he's not stupid, and he's not completely unaware of his own internal workings. He knows why he's angry. Was and still is.

Okay, here. Here's a thing. Here's a thing that almost happened. Looking at her again, not glaring now but looking at her and _not_ looking away, and shaking just a little. His hands. His knees, where his hands rest. Thinking about this at all arcs the flame into a roaring tower before it dies back. The floor starting to smolder. There was a man who was threatening them, their place. Wanted one of the people here - here, now, with them. Rick was ready to do it. Rick was ready to make the trade and he knew she wouldn't survive, knew that her death would very likely come slow and horribly. Was ready to do it anyway. Told him he had to help. Had to help _get her to this fucker,_ believe it or not. Had to help Rick _do_ that, get his own hands just as bloody when it wasn't his idea and he didn't agree to it and he fucking hated it, fucking hated seeing this man he loved twisting himself into a monster and trying to drag people in along with him, and here's the kicker, here's the really great part:

He thinks he might have done it.

Probably would have. Maybe not, but probably. Done it and hated it and hated himself and done it anyway, because it was Rick and what Rick says goes and as long as Rick doesn't make him go away and as long as Rick wants him around, says he _needs him_ , says that, allows him to be family. As long as those things were true he might have done just about anything.

As long as Rick didn't leave him behind.

Rick left him behind. Rick left him in the fucking trunk of a fucking car.

What did he just say?

He blinks. He's not actually sure what he just said. He doesn't remember all of it; it simply came out. He wasn't thinking about it and he couldn't have stopped it. He's breathing kind of hard. What the fuck part of it does she mean? The part where he would have handed a woman over to be tortured and killed because he wanted to make this prick happy with him?

No. The part in the middle of that.

Shakes his head. Hands clenched; hurts. In spite of the bandages it feels like he's tearing things open. Tearing a lot of things open. He's pooling blood and bile on the pristine white couch. He's staining everything. What the fuck is she _talking_ about? What does she _want_ him to say?

Rick making himself a monster. Making him one too.

Does he think he's a monster now? Does he think he's become one?

Stares at her. Stunned that she can even ask that question. He told her he wanted to practice knots with her guts and he meant it, and she's actually asking him if he thinks he's become a monster.

But he wasn't one. He wasn't born one.

Fuck does it matter?

 _It does matter._

He bites his lip. It's what he has. Bites it until he tastes blood slick and sweet on his tongue and swallows and that makes it a little better.

Also the other thing.

What other thing?

Why it was so bad, watching that. Watching Rick do that. Not just to the woman; to himself. Why it hurt so much, why he hated it the way he did. Does he remember that? The things he said to Rick when he went after him - does he remember any of it?

He's chewing at himself. It's such relief. God, it's something. Chewing at himself and staring at her, because fuck her and fuck whatever this game is, and he's been doing exactly what she wants and _playing it_ and whatever hand he had in this situation, he's given all of it up and the only person he can still hurt is him.

 _You said you loved him._

Oh.

That.

Fuck you, lady. Fuck you, fuck you in your dry fucking cunt with a rusty fucking machete. Fuck you until you're all nice and wet again, fuck you until you have five or six new holes in you for that specific purpose, fuck your ass with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. Fuck your teeth out and fuck your throat to shreds. Fuck you to death.

She's not afraid of him.

Quiet: It's the people he loves who will always be able to hurt him the worst. He can be hurt like that. He still can. And he still loves them, and there's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing wrong with being angry when he's so hurt.

Wants to laugh at her. Doesn't. Question: Shouldn't he stop loving people, then?

Does he want to?

What he wants to do is kill her. What he wants to do is smash the coffee table and cut himself to shreds. What he wants to do is curl up in his nest in his room in the dark and claw his hair out and scream and scream and scream.

Not sure he actually says any of that, and that _really_ doesn't matter, and _she_ can shut the fuck up about it mattering, stupid little Pollyanna everything's-a-big-game bitch, and he cringes inward and whimpers because no no no, he won't think that about her, he _can't,_ not with her light so close and her voice echoing in his ears and her warmth under his bandaged fingertips. Held against his skin. Sweet girl, she can say anything he wants and he'll be grateful for it. He'll fall down at her feet and collect her words like treasures and keep them close to his heart, and maybe she'll teach him to articulate - someday - how much he loves her. So she knows.

He's so unworthy of her, he's unworthy to even breathe the same air as her let alone put his filthy ugly hands on her, but he wants her to know. Because it hurts. She hurts him. She hurts him so fucking much.

No. He doesn't want to stop.

Why not?

Because it's all he has left.

* * *

Denise comes to them that evening. It's at the Greene-Rhee estate once again, and just like before they gather in the living room and distribute themselves into various places and finger cooling cups of horrible coffee and fiddle with hems and loose threads and knickknacks on shelves, and once again Carol is absent.

So is Carl. Beth wonders whether or not it's by his own choice.

But Deanna is there. Alone in a chair, hands clasped on her knees, and her features are pinched and sharp in the ruddy sunset light and her calm is dry and cold. She's not fidgeting. She's not apparently worried, not even in the steely way Michonne cultivates. She's just tired, which she is constantly these days for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with Daryl Dixon.

But Daryl Dixon isn't helping the overall situation.

Denise isn't fidgeting either. But she looks profoundly uncomfortable, sitting on the end of the couch next to Maggie and Glenn and not meeting anyone's gaze. She's holding a cup of coffee that she's not drinking. She's not exactly clutching it but she's not far off.

Beth sits hunched on the window seat, legs crossed, needle flashing in her fingers. She's stitching one of Judith's onesies - all torn up the side. Accident in the wash.

You can ruin something trying to clean it up.

"So," Denise starts, and stops and takes a breath, swallows, drums her nails on the ceramic of her mug. Handmade purely for the sake of being handmade. Justification for existence as flimsy as wet paper. "So. Yeah. I should say, I've only talked to him a couple of times now. That's not, like… That's not a formal diagnostic session or anything. I'm winging this."

Deanna makes a sound that might once have been a laugh, the rustle of leaves. "We all are."

"So." Rick turns from one of the tall front windows. He's been leaning one-handed, staring cross the street. No one has said anything to him since he came in. "So what's your _expert opinion?_ "

"Honestly? He's fucked." She sighs, raises a hand. "No, I know. I know. I'm sorry. He's not fucked, not totally. I think. Thing is, he might be. I don't _know."_

Pause. No one looks at anyone else. Deanna inclines her head. _Go on._

"Okay. Normally we'd be able to do all kinds of scans. Run tests. I'm not a neurologist or anything, but at the very least he'd have an electroencephalogram and we'd get a sense of what his brain is actually _doing._ But we don't have any of that. All I can say is his brain is damaged. Which isn't some big revelation, he got shot in the _head._ Aside from that… Like I said, I'm winging it, and I have no idea what kind of care he got right after he was shot. I just don't know."

Michonne shifts against the wall, face unreadable. Voice the same. "So what _do_ you know?"

Denise pauses again. There's something hypnotic about the flash of the needle, and Beth's gaze descends to it. She can sew very well by now, had to do it a lot at the prison and even before that there's always mending that needs doing on a farm, and she hadn't been thinking about the movements of her fingers at all. Now she is, tracking the smooth in-out and through and the shine of the pale pink thread, pink as a sunrise, and thinking about Daryl's thumb against her cheek.

The first time. Not the second. Not when it was bad.

They never got to have that. Not even sure what _that_ is, but they never got to have it. _Oh,_ and then nothing, and then something, the light pressure of his hand on her shoulder followed by the jolting impact of his body as he knocked her out of the way and took the shot. Literally took a fucking bullet for her.

Then his blood on her hands and a body without bones, and nothing again.

Now they have _this,_ his thumb stroking over her cheek and his eyes soft under the fear and the confusion, and the fear and the confusion is there regardless. They have this, and he's reaching for her out of his own wreckage, and all that touches her is his thumb.

And there's the other time. The second time, and how he sounded. Like she was taken _away from him._ Like now he feels like she _belonged to him._ And she doesn't know what to do about that. She doesn't know if there's anything _to_ do.

She doesn't know if she wants to do anything.

Pain like a static spark. Bead of blood welling at the point of her forefinger. She sucks it and closes her eyes.

Denise, coming to her through the red dark. "The memory problems, the trouble he has paying attention, and the… When he attacked you. Rick. That wasn't just _him._ I don't think so, anyway. It's… We saw things like this in people coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Y'know." Her voice takes on a slightly wry edge. "When that mattered. When he does things like that, I don't think he can control it. I don't think he could if he wanted to. Not totally. You know what the limbic system is?"

Beth opens her eyes, fingertip still pressed against her tongue. Glenn is passing a hand through his hair, sighing. "Pretend none of us do."

"It's part of the brain that regulates aggression. Among other things." She's not as nervous as she was. It's melting away from her with every word, as she falls into a kind of rhythm. Finds a center, Beth thinks. Everyone has one. Everyone has a beat. "That's almost certainly messed up. Maybe a lot. So… So yeah. You can't talk him out of stuff like that. It's not his fault." She pauses again, stares down at her cup. Stares _into_ it, as if it has depths. "I mean, none of this is. That's what sucks so much about it. He was probably a good guy. Once. Wasn't he?"

"What do we do?" Rick is somehow moving without moving, going toward her without budging from the spot he's occupying. It's like the cell. Just like that, advancing on her in every way except his body. Apparently they share that talent, him and Daryl. There's something sickly appropriate about that. "We have to be able to do something. You can't tell me there's _nothin'._ "

"I'm not." Denise looks up at him, and for once there's no sign that she feels an urge to look away. "There's things. What's wrong with him isn't all physical. _Nothing's_ all physical. He's traumatized. I can keep talking with him. I think that might help. It went okay today." The corner of her mouth quirks grimly upward. "He said he wanted to gut me with his bare hands, but yeah, I think it went okay. I think he might even like me."

Deanna leans forward slightly, hands still clasped. It's the first move she's made since she sat down. "What else?"

"This is the part that isn't so great." She swipes a hand down her face, all trace of the smile vanishing. "There's medication. Some stuff I could try. A lot of options, actually."

"So why is it _not so great?_ "

Denise doesn't answer immediately. She closes her eyes for a few seconds, and when she opens them they're on Beth. Outside of this exciting new twist in everyone's life, Beth can't remember ever saying more than a few words to her, but what's there now doesn't need to be spoken. Maybe Denise knows the history here, at least as much as anyone else would be able to tell her. Maybe she doesn't. But she knows _something,_ because every part of her is whispering _I'm so sorry._

"Finding the right medication for someone is trial and error." She shifts her gaze back to Deanna. "You have some probables, you try them, you try different dosages, and if they don't work or they don't work well enough you try something else. It can take a while. It's science, but it's not… It's not an _exact_ science. Daryl… He'd need more than one. He already has the stuff for his migraines, right? I'd probably want to try mood stabilizers. Antidepressants. The issue with his hands looks obsessive-compulsive to me, so that's another thing. I'm still pretty sure he's hallucinating, so I'd maybe want to try some antipsychotics. And they might interact badly with each other. It's not even just about the right thing in this case. It's about the right _combination_ of things."

"And why is that a problem?"

"Because," Denise says quietly, "no one is manufacturing those drugs anymore."

Silence. It stretches out. It expands, settles, reveals itself in all its angles and forms. Beth can almost see it, a gray cloud diffusing into fog that coalesces into the reason why, most likely, Daryl is in fact completely fucked.

"We have hardly any of what I'd need. We're not a mental health facility. We're not set up to deal with severe mental illness - and this _is_ severe mental illness."

"We make runs to pharmacies." Glenn glances around. "All the stuff you'd normally expect to get taken is gone, but I'd bet a lot of other things are still there. Couldn't that-"

"Okay. So maybe we have enough for a while. What about when we run out of _that?_ Because we will. And some of this… You can't just _stop taking it_."

"There's other pharmacies." Rick, voice steady and steady by its fingernails. "We go further afield. We've done it before."

"There's only so many," Michonne murmurs - and for once she sounds almost gentle, and her dark eyes are on no one but him. "We run through those. What do we do then? How far do we go, Rick? How much do we risk?"

Deanna sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. "How much do _all_ of us risk? I said I was risking a lot just by letting him stay. That's still true. We all are. Now we do this? For one man? I'm sorry, Rick, but… He _is_ one man."

Rick turns to her. Turns _on_ her, and this time the silence is like the fall of a slab of concrete. Everyone in the room has seen him like this by now, but it's never been like _this,_ and Beth spots the tension in Michonne's muscles, its build. She loves him, she'd fight and die for him, but she took him out once and Beth has never doubted that she'd take him out again if she had to.

When you care about people, getting hurt is part of the package. Sure.

So is hurting them.

"He's one of my people," Rick says - very low. Very cold. Head slightly tilted and teeth bared, and when he's like this he looks so much more like a wolf to her than a man. "You let me decide how much to risk. You let me decide how much he's worth. Don't you ever try to do that for me. Don't you _ever_ fucking do that." He steps back, and behind the mask of stone he's erected Beth can see magma churning. Swelling into a dome. Threatening to flow into lava.

Blood is still welling from the pad of her finger, so small and so bright, and she knows how small things can start and how they grow. How a little blood can become a torrent of it. They were never safe here. That was never true. So the danger Rick is becoming is nothing new. They're just seeing what was always there.

Daryl is forcing them to look. His damage, a mirror for their own.

 _We broke in Atlanta. We've been broken since then._

Rick shakes his head. "We're done here."

"Rick." Michonne is in motion now, stepping past the coffee table and reaching for him. "We can't just-"

"I said _we're done._ "

He whirls and heads for the door, wrenches it open, and a crowd of wide eyes follows him as he stalks into the world. No one else moves. Even Michonne has stopped, hand falling loosely to her side and her mouth twisting with pain as a breath shudders out of her.

She might be about to cry. It's not impossible.

But she doesn't. She turns, swiping her hands down her face, and sinks onto the arm of the couch. "I'll talk to him. Let him cool off first."

Deanna looks at her for a long, silent moment, then pushes to her feet, nodding. "Do that. For now I'm not making any decisions, but… Do that."

"But it's a fair question," Maggie says softly - so softly she's almost inaudible, soft in a way that telegraphs extreme reluctance to be saying it at all. "How much _do_ we risk?" Her voice doesn't quaver, but it ends in a sigh as she rakes her hair behind her ears and glances around at all of them.

All of them except Beth.

Michonne shakes her head. "We don't decide that now. We're _not_ done. And we're not getting anything else done at this point." She looks up at Deanna. "I'll be in touch."

Another nod from Deanna, singular. A tight movement and barely affirmation of any kind. "Make it soon."

She leaves. Silence reigns again, and at some point Michonne follows her, sliding quietly as a panther into the twilight. The sun is almost gone and the sky is a violent red that hints at storms. Beth drops her gaze to her lap and her breath catches; Judith's onesie is spotted with blood.

"He feels guilty," Denise murmurs, and Glenn and Maggie both jump, as if - despite the fact that she's sitting on the same couch as them - they had forgotten she was there at all. And possibly they had. "He- Shit, I'm sorry. Forget I said that."

Beth releases a hard little laugh. "People say that like it can ever happen." She sets the onesie and the sewing kit down and stretches out her legs, grimacing when her knees crack. Hardly even nineteen and sometimes her body feels ancient. Run through far more than it was meant to. Run ragged.

"Rick." Denise stares intently at the rug for a moment. "Just… I didn't mean to say it. Don't tell him I did."

Maggie peers at her. "What does he feel guilty about?"

"Rick left him," Denise says simply, not raising her head. "Daryl. He left Daryl. Or I'm guessing that's what it is. Daryl's sure as hell angry enough about it. Or that's what he said. I'm not sure how much of it he understands, how much he actually remembers and how much he's making up because that's just what his brain _does_ now, but… Daryl's angry at him for it. Really angry. And I think Rick knows it. And I think he feels guilty."

"We all left him," Glenn whispers.

"Yeah. But not like Rick." Denise finally looks up, at him. At Maggie. "You'd know that better than me. I could be totally wrong. But when I talked to him… That's what I got."

Maggie closes her eyes and leans forward over her knees, presses her fingertips against her brow. "You're not wrong."

"Okay." Denise ducks her head. "Okay. God, I'm… I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Sorry never helped anyone." Beth crosses to a standing lamp by the fireplace and cuts it on. The light in the room increases, but somehow the shadows remain. Daryl, she remembers, and how he collects the shadows and draws them around himself. How he clothes himself in them. Like he knows them, because he's spent weeks with only them as company, and inside his head it's still that way.

Shadows and fear and limbic rage but also the light she's sure she wasn't imagining. Reaching for her out of it, struggling through to touch her. Still strong enough to do that.

He's fucked. But he's not. At least not, in his way, really any more than the rest of them.

"He's got one thing going for him," Denise says at the door, pausing and turning to them. "One big thing. Might be the biggest. From everything I know, it usually is."

Maggie crosses her arms - not like someone toughening a stance but like someone who feels a cold and unexpected draft. And the night _is_ cool. Much cooler than the last one. "And what's that?"

"He wants to get better. He's angry and scared and he hates everything, and if the migraines are like Carol's been telling me, he's in a lot of pain a lot of the time… But he keeps saying he wants to stay here, and when he talks about getting violent, that's the reason he gives for why he won't. What that tells me is that he wants to get better." She pulls in a long breath. "Part of him believes it's possible. I think so. As long as that's true, he's not fucked. Not completely. As long as that's true, we've got some hope."

 _Hope,_ Beth thinks later, sitting in her room in the dark, on the bed, fingers tracing over the scar slashing across her cheek. Hope. If you don't have that, what's the point of living?

And he is. He's alive. Six hundred miles of Hell inside and out, and he's still alive. He could have ended it at any time and in so many different ways. Out there when it comes to suicide you're positively spoiled for choice, and really all you have to do is nothing. Survival takes work and it's work that never, ever stops, until it does and there's no more work to be done.

He could have given up. Every second, he could have given up. He didn't. He hasn't. He's alive, and he's _there._

There's light in his window. It's dimmed by curtains - she guesses he has many reasons to want to block sunlight - and it doesn't look as though it's very bright to begin with, but it's there, shining in a thick night beginning to rumble with thunder. A summer storm, maybe one of the first big ones. The first of many more; there's never only one.

She gets slowly to her feet and pads over to the window, gazes out across the street. He's so close. She didn't truly understand how close he was.

Looked at him across that table in the candlelight and she didn't understand then either. But she was beginning to.

 _Oh._

She raises a hand and presses it against the glass, over where his was. Is. She hasn't wiped it clean. Glass. That's all. Something that could break so easily and let the rain pour in when it comes.

 _He wants to get better_.

His exhausted eyes, pleading with her while his broken brain fumbled for the words. Not that they ever came very easily. _I can be alright._

She squeezes her eyes shut and the tears burn as they roll down her cheeks.

 _I know you can._


	12. I know you tried to rescue me

Things are really, really awful at the beginning of this. I think so, anyway. Just... Please proceed with caution.

* * *

 **Chapter 12: I know you tried to rescue me**

 _All night I stretched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone: Please keep him safe. Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She's shackled spread-eagle to one of the walls, naked, and he's shooting arrows at her.

For the most part this only puzzles him. He's not sure why this is happening. It doesn't make a lot of sense, why she should be chained to a wall in the bright high-noon sun. Who did that to her seems like a important question, as is the question of why it was done. In any case, it's also strange that he's firing arrows at her, because he doesn't remember deciding to do so and he doesn't know why he would want to.

Though he's pleased, as he sends one straight into the soft flesh of her abdomen just beneath her ribs and stabs a short, high scream out of her, that his aim is as good as ever.

It's also strange that he has the bow again.

He reloads, recocks, and takes aim.

He's also never seen her naked. Never in all the time they were together. He was careful not to. There was absolutely no hope of any real privacy between them, and what with one thing and another he had plenty of opportunities to see her tits at the very least - and wouldn't Merle have given him shit for passing up the opportunity to take a gander at those cute little bee stings, not much to get your hands on but _you go with what you got, don't you, brother?_ \- but he was very careful about avoiding that, and also he didn't want to, and also he's never really wanted that kind of view from anyone.

Though with her, the care with which he avoided it was particularly intense.

Here she is, though, in living color.

Well. Probably not for much longer.

Though he's taking care - now, about _this_ \- to make his shots both painful and non-lethal, or at least lethal only slowly. She's bleeding from bolts in her belly, her arm, shoulder, a part of her thigh where he was sure he wouldn't hit the artery, but the bolts actually serve to plug most of the worst of that and she's bleeding slowly, and if she bleeds out it's going to take a while.

She's screaming an awful lot. Screaming, sobbing, her scarred face shining with tears and snot, and it all drips down her chin and spatters shining onto her chest.

Even if he wanted to see her tits, there's not a great deal there to see.

She's asking him why he's doing it, pleading for him to tell her, and he doesn't know. He takes aim at her other shoulder, fires, and she throws her head back and shrieks and he's still really at a loss.

Her blood glitters in the sun like streams of liquid rubies. It's pretty. Prettier over the creamy perfection of her skin.

He doesn't know why he's doing this, as he reloads, except that it feels inevitable. It feels like something he was always going to do, and was just waiting for the appropriate time and place. That he would know when it came, and he would act, and it doesn't matter who chained her up like this and really it doesn't matter why they were so obliging. What matters is the fulfillment of a certain destiny: That he'll cause her as much pain as possible, do as much damage as he can, and then kill her, and he will do all of these things with carefully measured skill.

He's very good at killing. It might be the thing he's best at. He's actually not very good at much else. It might be all he's truly good for.

So he's going to destroy her now because he was never going to do anything else.

Saving her was a mistake. Now he's going to correct it.

He takes aim and waits, feels the comfortable weight of the bow in his hands and the solidity of the stock against his shoulder, takes pleasure in the act of sighting and the point of the bolt and all that potential energy coiled and ready to fly. He waits also to give her a bit more time to suffer; her head is hanging between her shoulders, hair clumped and stringy and soaked with sweat, and he can tell she's exhausted, in shock, and it's fairly impressive that she's still conscious at all, but this has to be done _right_ because he's only going to get a chance to do it once.

He fires into her chest. Not her heart; right breast, just below her nipple. Right lung. This time she only jerks with the impact and releases a rasping, hiccuping cry and slumps again.

One more thing, something to wake her up, because he wants her around for the finale. He bends and reloads, recocks, straightens up and takes aim and fires a perfect shot into the triangle of tight curls between her legs.

It punches into her, the impact very audible, and she convulses and by the way her arms wrench back and up he can tell she's dislocated both of them in a single spasm. She screams louder than he's heard her, louder than he would have believed she could, and it's jagged at the end and it breaks off suddenly and he thinks she's probably torn something in her throat.

He lowers the bow, shoulders it, and walks across the crisp grass to her.

He's done this extremely well. He's pleased with that, and even a little proud. She's still with him, and somehow she finds the strength to raise her head when he stops in front of her, her jaw slack and her eyes unfocused. Her mouth is moving loosely, as if she's trying to say something. But she ruined her voice. That sweet voice. She doesn't have it anymore.

Of course there's a gun holstered at his hip, and of course he grips her by the hair with one hand and draws with the other, and of course he presses the muzzle to her brow. Very carefully. Almost gently. Just the right spot. Not where his scar is.

He can't risk the same thing that happened to him happening to her.

He looks at her for a long time. She was always so beautiful, and even like this she's beautiful. And she'll still be beautiful after he does what he's going to do. She might be more beautiful than she's ever been, because this is what was always supposed to happen, and it's ending perfectly.

"It should have been you," he whispers, and he pulls the trigger.

Yes. It's beautiful.

* * *

Screaming. Might be. Screaming, screaming as loud as she was. Or not. He's not sure, his throat feels like someone ran a cheese grater over it but there could be any number of reasons for that, and silence is jackhammering between his ears. Twisting in the sheets and fists flailing, fighting to get free, fighting the air, the world, everything, blood gushing into his mouth from his tongue as he bites it in half and his bandaged fingers scrabbling on the floor, clawing at his face, clawing it to gory ribbons, and the dark is like a cannonball smashing into his head.

No, that's the floor. The wall. Throwing himself against it until it dents and caves and he's showered with plaster and drywall, hitting himself as hard as he can, trying to break something. Shatter. Maybe he's doing that, because he _should_ , he should disable himself completely, he should have someone take a sledgehammer to his knees and not just because it's what he deserves. He should have someone put his foot against a block and hobble him. Maybe he's trying to crack his monstrous, disgusting skull open.

Maybe he's trying to finish the job.

Or maybe he's not. Maybe he's just curled on his side, or lying here on his back and staring at the flames licking across the ceiling, and somehow breathing, somehow existing, and wondering why that's still the case, and wondering why - even now - he can't cry.

* * *

Sometimes she has the scissors.

Sometimes she has the gun.

Sometimes she has the gun and she's where Dawn was, the light bizarre and somehow falling crooked across the world, and no one is moving. No one appears to feel any sense of urgency, even though this was and should be a desperately urgent situation. They're merely watching this tableau, bearing silent witness, and in fact every one of them is faceless, smooth blank nothings where their features should be. She knows who they are, knows their names and loves them all, but ultimately they don't matter. Ultimately they're of no significance.

The only person of any significance is kneeling in front of her, slumped and shaking, clinging. Holding on by his ruined fingers as his breath comes in harsh rasps. He's filthy, blood-streaked and stinking of decay, because all the showers in the world couldn't wash off what he truly is. He's so tired and he's in so much pain; she's amazed that he can hold on at all. That he's made it this far. That he's still there. He's so strong, and he's tried so hard.

But it's cruel to make him continue like this any longer.

And he doesn't want to continue. He's making that abundantly clear. He's whispering to her in his hoarse, broken voice, and in the utter silence around them she can hear him distinctly even with his head bowed. Just like in her mind's eye she can see the moon-patch scar on his brow - crusted with fresh blood because he's gouged it open as if digging for the bullet that's already passed through - where everything should have ended and didn't.

 _Please. I just want it to stop._

 _Get it right this time._

And she can. She has this chance, this precious chance to get it _right,_ to free him, because he's trapped, because he doesn't belong here, because she loves him too much to watch him live in Hell.

Her aim is good. It's stunningly good. But she doesn't need good aim for this. There won't be any mistakes this time. He raises his head and stares up at her with his weary, hopeless eyes, and he closes them as she gently presses the muzzle against the center of his brow.

He's smiling.

It's a beautiful smile.

* * *

Somehow she would have expected a gunshot at close range to be much louder.

This is more of a sharp tapping.

And she's blinking into the dark, too confused to feel anything else. Just the dark and then the dark in _motion,_ swirling sickeningly around her, and she can feel his desperate grip loosening and falling away as the bullet crashes through his brain, the bullet she fired from the gun she held, and she's flinging herself sideways and retching, shoving herself up to sit and dropping her head between her knees and breathing in huge, aching gasps.

She's going to throw up. She's going to vomit a soup of broccoli and instant mashed potatoes all over the hardwood and the tastefully patterned blue and white area rug.

No. She's not. She's breathing and she's not. Thin, watery control is seeping back into her and she won't. But it's _never_ been that bad. Somehow even when there's been more blood and his brain and fragments of his shattered skull spattered over her, when he's taken forever to die and stared up at her with cold and vicious hatred, even when she's shot him herself - which has happened, more than once - it's never been that bad.

He's never asked for it. Begged for it. It's never been like that.

She jams her teeth against each other and rakes her hands through her hair so hard it sparkles stings over her scalp and her eyes water - not just from that, but it doesn't help - and she's reaching over to cut the light on, because there's no fucking way she sleeps any more tonight, when she hears it again, and it's no bullet and it's no dream.

It's tapping.

It's tapping at her window.

Her gut had been threatening to heave its contents all over the floor; now it ices over. She hasn't even raised her head and looked and she already knows who it is. It couldn't be anyone else. And she asked him, she _asked_ him not to and she really believed he understood and he wouldn't do it no matter what else is going on in his head, and _shit,_ that he would not only do it anyway but that he would do it _now._

She closes her eyes and leans further forward. That he would do this to her now.

That she would have the gall to give a fuck about that.

But she's lurching to her feet and stumbling groggily in the direction of the window when it hits her: He's _tapping._ He's not watching her while she sleeps, watching her with whatever sick possessiveness he might be incubating like a virus. He's there and he's tapping, because he wants her to _know_ he's there, because he wants to see her. He wants to talk to her.

Like she told him he could.

She didn't tell him he shouldn't come over at night like this. She thought that might be implicit. He seemed to understand other things. But really - she stops, staring at the shadows beyond the windowpane and searching for him, for the light in his eyes - why shouldn't he? Why shouldn't he do that? Why shouldn't he _need_ to?

Everything is worse at night.

She bends close and there he is, standing back a little and looking in, barely more than a darker shape on a field of darkness. The night is moonless and a wind is whipping up outside, yanking at the trees - that storm almost here. His hair is blowing in his face, obscuring most of it, but he's hunched and hugging himself, and she doesn't need to see his face - or his eyes - to know that something has happened to him.

She answer-taps and he steps forward, glancing around nervously - yes, he's not oblivious. She didn't tell him that this wasn't ideal but he would have known anyway. She thinks. At any rate, he seems to have done. He seems decidedly uncomfortable about being here at all.

Breathing is easier now. She can do this. What she can't do is ignore him. Never. Never that. She doesn't _want_ to. What she wants to do is plunge through that flimsy barrier of glass and shatter it with herself, cling to him as tight as he was clinging to her, hold on like she always should have done, like she did in the hallway with his blood staining her hands and mouth, like she has a chance to do over again and she can't seem to find the balls to _do it_ because yes, he _is_ scaring her, and she's too much of a fucking coward.

Which he isn't. Whatever else he's lost, courage isn't something he's lacking. It's brought him here.

She gestures toward the front of the house, mouths _I'll be right there,_ and he nods and melts into the shadows.

 _Be right there._ Yes, she will. She closes her eyes again and turns, and fights back a violent wave of shivering as her stomach coils in on itself and her throat twists shut. She was always going to be there.

The second he walked through the gates was the second they both ran out of choices.

* * *

He's on the porch when she opens the door, but not right in front of her. He's huddled to the side, out of the way and in another thick band of shadow, arms still wrapped around his middle. He jerks his head up, and it's dark - she hasn't turned on a single light - and his hair is still hiding most of his face, but she can see enough.

His eyes are huge and black, and not because they're rejecting the light. They're hollow. He's trembling. She sucks in a breath that chokes itself halfway to her lungs, and he steps forward and she can see him fully.

She thought of him as a wraith when he came in, something wildly undead that had nothing to do with walkers. He looks like that again, haunted and haunting and desperate, bloodless, fleshless, eyes pools of inky emptiness, and somehow not entirely _real._ Not entirely part of the world. Or something that shouldn't be here. Something that doesn't belong.

Thunder growls and the air already smells like ozone. Somewhere a wakeful bird screams.

"I'm sorry," he breathes. Jesus, his teeth are practically chattering. The night isn't _that_ cold. If anything it's gotten warmer, muggy with oncoming rain. But she's not oblivious either. It's not cold that's doing it to him. "I know, I know, I'm sorry, I just. I just. I just had to see you. I just had to do that." He swallows and ducks his head. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Because it is. Without thinking - and that's good - she reaches out and grazes her fingers over his bare forearm, and he doesn't flinch. He doesn't stop trembling, but he doesn't pull away, and he lifts his gaze to her again and the light is there.

Flicking. Faint. But there.

"Did somethin' happen?"

He takes a breath, and then another. They're jittery and shallow. It sounds like he hasn't been taking enough of them. "I can't sleep."

She could read him before everything went to hell and she can read him now, and that's not all. That's not _nearly_ all. When she saw him last - barely a day ago though it feels like a year - he wasn't like this. Terrified, then dead and gone, then that awful _thing_ lurking in his touch, but then him again, and he had been stable enough. Contained. Maybe not talkative, but he sat with her, and when he asked her to go - the approaching pain horribly apparent behind his slightly unfocused eyes - he asked her calmly. Gentleness there, even, or something that wants to remember how to be gentle.

Now he looks like a sufficiently loud noise might knock him over. The terror he was feeling with her before is nothing to this. Maybe he hasn't flinched at her hand, but everything in and about him is screaming that he wants to turn and run.

Where the fuck would he even go?

And looking at him now… He _is_ alive. He's alive, and all signs indicate that at least for now he does want to stay that way. Once again, facing that, it's like she can finally fill her lungs. Like her heart is finally beating strong enough to send blood to the rest of her.

So maybe she needed to see him too.

"Me neither," she says softly, and steps aside. "Why don't you come in."

* * *

For a long moment after she closes the door he stands in the dark front hall with her, his arms falling to his sides, and he says nothing. He's glancing around, scanning everything, probably seeing immediately - if he didn't already know - that the floorplan is essentially identical. She wonders if he'll find that comforting or simply not care.

She has to figure out what to do with him. She feels like she's wandering through a dream, her thoughts stuttering and muddy, but she has to figure that out. The dream-haze is also lifting the longer they stand here, and it dimly occurs to her to question whether she should feel overly exposed in just her shorts and camisole, whether she should have taken ten seconds out of her busy schedule and tossed something on.

She doesn't feel exposed. He's not _making_ her feel that way, and not just because he appears to be having trouble looking at her at all.

At last she touches his arm again. Apparently that's okay, at least for the present, and touching him reestablishes that he's real and he's here, and that's another good thing. That's something she wants more of. The knot in her gut and throat loosens a little every time it happens.

And she remembers touching him before. Him touching her. So hesitant but then eager, like he was learning how, until he was scooping her up in his arms just to make her laugh and it worked, her arms around his neck and his hold on her strong and sure.

She's knotting up again.

"The coffee sucks." She smiles faintly. "But the tea is okay. You want some?"

He looks at her, shrugs, looks away. A shrug from him probably amounts to _sure,_ which is at least well-mapped ground.

"Alright." She has to figure out what to do with him, and she doesn't have many good options. She can only imagine what might happen if Maggie or Glenn or both of them wakes up and finds him here like this. It would be best if that scenario remained confined to her imagination. "No one knows you're here, do they?"

He shakes his head. Of course they don't. Same deal over there. She doesn't think anyone has actually attempted to prevent him from going anywhere - as far as she knows he hasn't tried to leave the property at all, hasn't given any indication that he wants to - but in this case there might have been an issue. It might have been unpleasant.

She and he and whatever's between them are still enormous elephants in a very small room.

"Go back to my room and wait for me." She gestures down the hall. "You know where it is."

For a moment longer he stares at her, as if he doesn't completely understand, and she's about to repeat it when he nods and turns, moves silently in the direction she indicated.

He glances back once, and what she sees on his face is far too complex to be called _gratitude,_ but if it could be, it would be the fiercest gratitude she's ever seen.

* * *

In the dark she let him in, and in the dark she makes tea.

She doesn't use the stove, the kettle - the microwave is quiet and faster and an all-around better option, and they've been doing a good job lately of minimizing their power use. She stands in front of it and watches one mug of water spin, and then the other, her fingers tapping the cardboard box of tea and wondering if she's ever going to get a handle on anything much. It's probably stupid, probably she should have known better, but part of her had been hoping that given some time, she might get better too. If he settled, so might she. She might settle anyway, into a world where he's still breathing. But she hasn't. If anything she's doing worse. It's not just the dream; she gets closer to him, makes a study of him, and everything she sees that gives her hope also rips her apart just a little more.

Hoping.

It's such a bad idea to do that.

She drops the bags in and carries the mugs down the hall to her room.

There's a small lamp on the dresser by the door, not very bright, and she sets one mug down and cuts it on and hesitates, blinking as her eyes adjust.

He's sitting on her bed. He's sitting like she saw him sit by too many campfires in the first few days after the prison fell, when everything was at its worst, with his knees drawn up and his head down. Except they were never drawn up this much, his arms were never wrapped tight like they are now, and he wasn't this _thin._ Because she sees that with a fresh sharpness that stabs her: He's so fucking thin. Or he appears that way now, more than he did on the porch, His frame far too sharp beneath the fabric of his shirt. And it's not just that; the shadows are collecting under his eyes and his cheekbones and he looks gaunt, he looks _old,_ but at the same time he looks _small_ , and more than anything he looks for all the world like a scared little boy.

Because in so many ways that's exactly what he is.

He looks up, and she wasn't wrong about his eyes. Huge, very dark, but also very much his own, and it's horrible, but it's possible that when he's most frightened he's also most himself.

That says a lot of things, and none of them are good.

His feet are bare beneath the frayed hem of his jeans. She realizes that he must have walked over that way, and is totally unsurprised. Except for something dark wedged under the nail of his left big toe they're clean in a way that startles her. Clean and pale and curiously unscarred, a webwork of blue veins standing out beneath his skin.

"Hi," he says, soft, and she picks up the other mug and crosses the room to him, sinks down beside and facing him, and offers it to him. Cautiously, he takes it, sets his nose over the steam and inhales.

"Chamomile."

He nods. "I know."

He would know. It's not like she ever discussed botany or anything with him, but she got to know him well enough out there to know that when it comes to things like that he's practically a walking encyclopedia. Just not a very verbal one. He couldn't have lost all of that. He knew it was chamomile the second she walked through the door.

He's quiet for a minute, simply holding the tea, and it's a quiet full of potential words so she leaves it be. He's gathering himself and he should be able to do that in peace. She can discern a very slight tremor in his hands - which are bandaged, so that's something, though some of the bandages are stripping off and revealing freshly torn skin beneath - but he seems calmer.

"Thank you," he murmurs at last, and she exhales and attempts a lopsided smile.

"Like I said. Couldn't sleep."

He rolls a shoulder. "Still didn't have to let me in." Lifts the mug. "Didn't have to do this."

She tilts her head, fingers wrapped around her own mug, and feels her mouth tighten. That he's pointing these things out is strange in a way she can't identify. "I wasn't just gonna leave you outside."

"No." He suddenly and steadily meets her gaze, his own clear, and she almost jumps, even though his voice is - if anything - even softer. "You weren't." He lowers his head again and sips at the tea with an odd kind of delicacy, closes his eyes, and she holds her breath and thinks that possibly it's better.

"If you- if sleeping's a problem," she says after another minute or two of nothing - and the thing he said about just having trouble sleeping is bullshit and she knows it and she says it anyway - "Denise has-"

"Klonopin." He nods. "She left some."

"She came to see you." Not a question, and it earns her another nod.

And then she does something truly foolish, knows that it's foolish just like what she said before was bullshit - not only foolish but _insulting_ \- and she's beating her fists against the inside of her own skull and screaming at herself to stop even as the words emerge from her mouth.

"What was she there for?"

His head doesn't move but his eyes snap to her, instantly sharp, and it takes every fragment of spine she has to keep from edging away from him, and maybe dropping the tea on the bedside table and fleeing across the room. Black eyes. Not dead, no. That might be better, because when he went dead and told her about what he did at Grady, he wasn't threatening her at all. He isn't now, but there's how he's _looking_ at her.

Anger, yes. A healthy amount of it. But not explosive anger. She doesn't think so. Which is somehow worse. It's run through with pain, as if she's slapped him and it wasn't completely unexpected but he was thinking she wouldn't.

He looks betrayed.

"You _know_. You were all over here talkin' about me. With her. Weren't you?"

His voice is quick, the syllables pointed at the end as if he's firing them at her, and she bites at her tongue, her tea cooling in her lap. This can't already be fucked up.

 _Oh, yes, it can._ "Daryl-"

" _Christ_ , Beth. I'm brain-damaged, but I'm not _stupid._ You think I can't add two and two and get four? Think I can't do that?" He lowers his own mug and leans in, teeth slightly bared and eyes narrow, and it's not exactly like the shack, he wasn't close to her like this then and if anything she could feel him coiling away like a snake in preparation to strike, but in so many ways it's the same thing.

 _Is that what you think of me?_

"Daryl." She nearly puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back, and she stops herself. They're not at that point. Not yet. "I didn't mean-"

"How about you don't fuck around with me?" He jerks his head in the direction of the street. The words are sharp, his gaze, his movements; he's a loaded bolt just looking for a target to be fired at. "All them over there, that's what they're doin'. Don't you do that too. Don't you do it."

"I'm sorry," she whispers. And she is, and she should be. It was a bad fucking step. He knows; it would be unlike him to _not_ know, regardless of how much of him is broken. His perceptiveness always bordered on the uncomfortable. He could always untangle a situation, see all its strands in distinct isolation.

Except when it came to himself.

He's breathing as quickly as he was speaking and the trembling has returned, and she can see the containment starting to wear away, and Denise is murmuring in her ear.

 _When he does things like that, I don't think he can control it. I don't think he could if he wanted to._

This could be another foolish thing. She almost certainly shouldn't do it; when she touched him on the back porch it upset him, and just because it hasn't done so tonight doesn't mean it won't now that he's worked up - and like this, panic in him could be incredibly dangerous - but she does it anyway. If instinct applies here, it might be the best director she has. She reaches up and presses a hand against his chest, but she doesn't push, and his heart is fluttering under her palm like a trapped and panicking bird.

And he freezes, eyes slipping half closed. Takes a long breath as a shiver rolls through him.

"I'm alright," he breathes, and again she knows he's mostly not talking to her. But she answers anyway, softly.

"Yeah. You are."

Another few seconds and he pulls back, drawing in on himself and shooting her a glance, his teeth worrying at his flaking lip. "I just. I need you to not do that." He pauses and squeezes his eyes shut, his face twisting with pain she doesn't know how to define. It's too big. It incorporates too much. "Please."

"Okay." It's all right now, she's sure; once more she touches his arm, lays her hand over the tight, narrow muscle, and he doesn't yank it away. "I won't. I'm sorry."

He ducks his head - an apology of his own, she thinks with a degree of surprise. And he's silent again.

She sighs. "She was here. We talked about you." Because now they've arrived at this, and it's pointless to pretend they haven't. It would just insult him again. "She was talkin' about ways to help you. Among other things."

He flicks another glance at her. "She can't help me."

Keeping her voice low, steady: "She thinks maybe she can."

"How the fuck?" He laughs, rough and brutally short. "She gonna grow me a new brain or somethin'?"

 _He wants to get better. Part of him believes it's possible._

"She said there were a few things. What's so bad about tryin'?" Everything. Everything is bad about trying, because like faith, it ends up getting you killed. Getting someone else killed. She's saying shit she doesn't especially hold to and she's not sure why, and in her dreams she's putting him down like a sick dog. "Is everythin' great right now, or somethin'?"

He looks at her again. He looks at her for a long time, looks at her until she's squirming and hating that she is, all of him seeming to flow away and leave him a husk before her. A husk whose face is wrenched, every part of him wrenched, not wrathful and not hating her but just sad.

Lost.

"Beth," he says, so softly she almost can't hear him. "I'm in Hell."

Her throat clutches at itself and the ceramic is hard as diamond under her hooked fingers. _Fuck,_ she doesn't want to cry in front of him. Not again. He'll hate it, it'll hurt him - not least because he won't be able to make it stop - and it'll risk spiraling this whole thing out of control. But her eyes are stinging and the world is blurring into fuzzy indistinctness, and for a moment she has to turn away from him. And that in itself is horrible.

"Sometimes I know I am." He pauses a beat, and she can't make this stop either. "Everything's burnin', forever, and I know I am. The fuck else could this be? I'm in Hell. And I ain't never gettin' out."

"That's not true." Hoarse whisper. It's all she can manage, and it sounds pathetic against his flat certainty. But he doesn't answer, and after another couple of minutes she can stand to look at him again. His knees are pulled in closer to his chest and he's staring down at his half empty mug, hair hanging in his face.

"Daryl, it's _not._ "

He shrugs. "Maybe." Pause. "You were talkin' about whether or not you're gonna let me stay."

Naturally he knows this too. It's not a difficult thing to infer, the most educated of guesses. So without bothering to deny, she asks. "How do you know?"

"'cause Rick came in real angry. He's shit at hidin' stuff." The dry, withered remains of a smile. "Always was."

"He wants you to stay."

He glances up, mouth a thin line. "He's a fuckin' idiot."

She wants to smile too. Maybe less withered than his. He's not speaking with any particular humor, but there's something so perversely amusing about the ludicrousness of this whole thing. "Yeah, he is. Not about this, though." She sets her mug down; as on the back porch, she mostly got it to give her hands something to do anyway, and it's not helping much. "Denise said you wanna stay."

He rolls a shoulder.

"Do you?"

"I don't belong here," he says quietly, and that appears to be the only comment he has to offer.

But it's not a _no._

For a little while she simply watches him in the dim light, his bandaged fingers moving slightly against his mug, moving as he takes another sip even though by now it has to be lukewarm at best. Gazing down into it with his brow furrowed and his jaw working as if he's trying words out in silence before he actually employs them. Again she's punched in the chest by how thin he is, how even on their worst days he never looked like this, was never this far away from her and simultaneously this impossibly close. But he was also passive then, or sliding into passivity. Right now he's fighting - something else she can almost see through his skin. She thought after the meeting about how he hadn't given up, and he hasn't.

And whatever happened tonight to shake him so badly, to frighten him that much, he didn't hide. He came to her. The enormity of that for him is something she's not sure she can adequately conceive of. She's not sure she can understand.

If he's fighting, he believes there's something here worth fighting for. Even if he doesn't know it.

She faces him more fully and sits crosslegged, reaches out and touches the back of his hand with a single fingertip. No hesitation. She can't hesitate, can't call attention to what she's doing, and he still doesn't flinch. "Why are you doin' this?"

He looks up at her, frowning. "What?"

"Your fingers. Why are you bitin' them like that?"

He blinks at her, clearly nonplussed. "'cause… I mean, I have to."

He says it as if it's self-evident, as if it's something she should implicitly understand - as if it's a common thing to do and the reasons behind it are correspondingly common knowledge. Whether or not he actually _thinks_ that is another question entirely.

"Why do you have to?"

"I don't-" He stops and releases a frustrated sigh, spreading one of his hands - gingerly, as if the act of extension hurts him, which it probably does. She knows this when she sees it: He's searching for uncooperative words, groping for them - trying, in spite of the difficulty in something that should be easier for him. He's trying for her. "It feels bad if I don't." He points to his chest, low. "Here. And other times. I just… I have to do it."

His voice is tight, and it's not all frustration. He sounds vaguely bewildered - beyond what she now recognizes as his usual confusion - and when he looks down at his hand as if it's not even his she sees it so much more clearly, and she thinks _obsessive-compulsive._ "I don't want to. But I want to. I need to."

"You need to let them heal." Gently, as gently as she can. She guesses - _knows_ \- that it was Carol who bandaged them for him. Got him to let her. In a flush of treacherous imagination, she considers how utterly impossible this would be without her. If they had lost her too. "They'll get infected."

He slaps his hand against the mattress and she jumps, stifles a tiny yelp - but he's not angry. Not as far as she can see when she centers herself and studies him, the way his features appear frozen in mid-wince.

He's miserable.

"You think I don't _know_ that?"

"Okay." She leans forward and lays her hand over his - ragged bandages rough against the pads of her fingers and the softer skin beneath - and he merely gazes at it, at hers, and doesn't move at all. "It's okay. Just… Try not to. Alright?"

He nods. But there's no conviction in the gesture, and she knows he doesn't believe it'll make any difference.

And maybe it won't.

Wordlessly, he holds out his mug. She takes it and puts it down beside hers, and he looks at his hands again. "I don't wanna do any of this," he murmurs, and her nails dig into her palms as she clenches her own hands into fists. Clenches everything, shoulders and throat and legs and torso, and no longer cares if he notices and wonders about it. She's sick of hiding things from him anyway. She's not strong.

If they can't help him she has no idea what she'll do.

"You lied to me."

She starts - not a jump but deeper. Stares at him, eyes wide. It came out of nowhere, and what he might be talking about is a blank space in her head. He doesn't sound angry - doesn't even sound particularly upset this time - but he sounds sure. Maybe a tiny bit reproachful. Either way, calm.

"Daryl." She swallows, hard, and it lodges between her collarbones. "I don't know what you're-"

"You could sleep. You were sleepin'. I saw you." He half shrugs, and the corner of his mouth lifts into something that might actually almost be a smile. All at once the misery has disappeared and he looks different. He looks brighter, clearer. He looks _there._ "I wasn't, like… _watchin'._ But I saw you." He stops and studies her more closely. Leans in, searching her with his gaze. Still no trace of anger. "You were dreamin'. It looked… Looked bad."

 _Oh._

She drags in a slow breath and rubs a hand down her face, presses her fingertips against her eyes until white spots bloom and dance. No point in denying this, either. Though she's not telling him what it was. _Fuck,_ there is just no fucking way she's ever telling him that. It would be great if it was already partially forgotten, dissipating like any other dream long enough after waking.

"'s alright. I ain't mad." Again with that minute curl that at least contains the potential of a smile. A microscopic edge of amusement, and not at her expense. It's her turn to be confused. This is incongruous. This doesn't fit any of the rest of this deeply surreal conversation. Though, given how surreal it is, none of it really fits with any other part anyway.

And then he touches her. Simply reaches out and does it, his mostly gauze-capped fingertips ghosting over her bare shoulder, her upper arm. It's hardly anything at all, but he's not hesitating. He's not afraid. He's not forcing himself to do it, or doing it with any evident anxiety about the possibility that she won't want him to and will react badly. He's just _doing_ it, and when she stiffens he lifts his hand away but doesn't recoil.

He's touching her like he did. At the end.

"Y'okay?"

She gapes at him. She can't help it. So often since he died - which he _did,_ even if he didn't - he's been a ghost she carries and now he truly _is_ one, the shade of a man she knew sitting in front of her in a body that isn't quite his own, in which he doesn't quite belong. So piercingly _present,_ so undoubtable, and not the man who came to her tonight, who tapped on her window and huddled shivering in the dark. The thunder has been absent for a while but now it growls, much closer, and she gasps and her hands fly to her mouth before she can stop them.

He doesn't seem to notice. He's just looking at her, like he was. Waiting for an answer.

"I'm okay," she whispers through her fingers, and he nods, appearing satisfied.

And he's gone.

The change is abrupt, startling, and it takes every part of him simultaneously. He draws in and turns his face away, lowers his head, and the tremor is back and running all through him like an electric current. It's _him_ again, not who he once was but who he has to be now. He's not just drawing himself in; he's _shrinking_ as pieces of him carve themselves off and disappear, and in the set of his shoulders and the wound tension of his arms she sees now-familiar terror joining the misery from a few moments ago.

He's scared all the time. All the fucking time. His world is terrifying.

 _Hell._

"I had a dream." It rides out on a ragged breath, half muffled. "I was…" He briefly presses his forehead against his knees, features wrenched into an awful grimace partially visible through the fall of his hair, and she realizes that he's rocking very slightly. He's broken open, _been_ broken, because whatever sent him here, he escaped it for a little while, but now it's caught him and hooked its claws into him and it's not letting him go. And it's _forcing_ him to say this, and he doesn't want to.

She doesn't want him to.

It's like his trembling is contagious, and she's shaking too when she reaches for him. He's telling her. She couldn't tell him, _can't,_ but he's telling _her,_ and she closes her hand over his again and her grip is tight, even though part of her is aware that she might hurt him. "Daryl… You don't have to-"

"I was _hurtin' you._ " It rips out of him in a single ghastly rush, fast but not nearly fast enough and clearly making him feel every syllable as it rakes past his lips, and she's sure he must be crying except when he hauls his stricken eyes up to meet hers they're completely dry. He's shaking his head in small, ferocious twitches. "I was hurtin' you so _bad,_ I swear to fuckin' God, Beth, I don't want to, I don't wanna do that, I won't, I swear I won't. _Fuck,_ I swear I never will."

It was already in her mind, knowing it happened, knowing something she should have had no way of knowing. But this was inevitable. She was dreaming her dream and he was dreaming his, and it sent him here when he would have wanted to run from her, when he _did_ want to, and he still does. She's certain. She knows _him_. And he's shuddering, anguish tumbling through him like a boulder plunging downhill, and she can be here for him, she can even touch him, but she can't fix this. She can't save him.

God, she should be able to. But she can't.

She can do this.

Thunder snarls as she thrusts herself up and forward, her body battering itself through the air, through the space between them like that flimsy sheet of glass, and when her arms close around him it's to catch him because he's already burrowing into her with a broken moan, hands curling into the fabric of her camisole and his breath rough and desperate against her throat. He's shaking even harder, shoulders hitching like sobs even if he's not weeping, and she rocks back on her heels and lays her cheek against the crown of his head, one hand combing into his hair.

Her palm cupped over the back of his skull. The place where their world exploded.

"I know," she breathes. She doesn't know anything of the kind. She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears and there's no fucking point and there never was. She honestly thought she had done all her crying weeks ago. She thought she had nothing left inside. She was wrong about almost everything she possibly could be. "It's alright. I know you won't." She pulls him closer but it's not as if there's really any space left between them, with his arms tight around her waist and the rest of him practically in her lap.

 _Small._

So much of him is just gone.

But his arms are strong.

She doesn't know how long they stay like that. But eventually the shudders subside and he quiets, no longer breathing in those rasping heaves, knotted muscles beginning to loosen under her hands. He's heavy like this, and without exactly meaning to she lowers herself onto her side, still holding him and taking him with her - and perhaps this shouldn't feel as natural as it does. Perhaps it should feel profoundly _un_ natural. Perhaps she should be struggling with it, tangled with him like this in her bed and touching more than they ever did in all that time together, him pressed against her and even now seeming to want to literally hide _inside_ her, head pushing into her breast. But it doesn't feel wrong and there's no struggle here; she strokes his hair - damp with his fear-sweat and her tears - and his back, unconsciously traces the knobs of a far too prominent spine, and when his breath settles into a slow, even rhythm she finds herself matching it. Everything in her is loosening too, easing, because maybe pieces of him are gone but he's _right here,_ he's warm and solid and living, and he came to her when it must have been the hardest thing in the world for him to do, and he's trying.

She's holding a dead man who simply refuses to die. Even when his own brain is probably doing its level best to kill him.

"I want it to stop," he whispers, and her chest seizes - God, _no_ \- but he doesn't end it there. "I don't wanna be like this anymore. I wanna get better."

 _Oh._

She has no idea how she can hold him tighter, but she does. Loosening, relaxing, but tighter, tighter than she ever did in that fucking hallway, because she has a chance to get it right this time and she's not letting him slip away.

 _Part of him believes it's possible._

 _As long as that's true, we've got some hope._

"You will." She doesn't know that either. Hope has seemed like the cruelest trap imaginable. But _it wouldn't kill you to have a little faith._ And maybe it doesn't always. Maybe sometimes it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe sometimes, through six hundred miles of a hell she can't begin to imagine - a hell he hasn't escaped even now - it's all that keeps you alive.

He had it for her, in the end. Maybe she can have it for him. Maybe she can do that too, even if it won't save him.

"You will."


	13. all the jagged edges disappear

**Chapter 13: all the jagged edges disappear**

 _And angels, about twelve angels, angels knocking on your head right now, hello hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to meet him there, in Heaven?_ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Her scent.

He knows it - retention of sense memory. He never got very close to her before, never had much of a chance, but there was a time when she hugged him, he knows, because he remembers the warmth of her against him and how small and strong she felt, and he remembers his hand on her elbow and not knowing what to do with the rest of him. And he remembers the top of her head just under his chin and how that was actually nice, _nice_ even if he was so confused, and he remembers smelling her. She showered and she did so recently. Shampoo, yes: Not cloying but soft and clean, but there was also a deeper smell, a _Her_ smell that he could never describe even to himself, even in the most abstract terms, and laughing in his arms she smelled that way again, even under days without more than cursory bathing. He'll admit it even if it cuts him open, even if it's so much more than he should even _think_ about because _fucking hell,_ he's sickened by himself with what he was dreaming, but then he remembers how it felt, and he remembers that he wanted to lower his face and press it against the crown of her head and breathe her in.

Wanted that. Fuck. _Wanted_ it. Squeezes his eyes shut when he understands that she's doing that very thing to _him_. Coming back to him like the dream: A breakage of a kind, only partially clear, but he knows he let go and fell and she was there - mercy beyond comprehension - and he's been sleeping in her arms, in her _bed,_ and her face is pressed against the crown of his head.

Warm like her. All inside him and outside, warm. Against him, like the prison. Like how he went to bed that night and it had been such a bad fucking day and he was so sick of losing people but he slept well anyway, and he never bothered to wonder why.

Sleeping now and not dreaming. Her hands on his back. His hand on her hip. Head nestled against her breast.

This is so good, and it's so wrong.

It's so wrong because she should have made him leave. She should have heard his confession and maybe granted him some absolution because that's in her nature, her wonderful kindness, her ineffable grace. He would have kissed her fingers for it and God, _God,_ not bitten her, not bitten them off even if he was thinking about it, because he'll take a pair of pliers to his own teeth first. But then she should have sent him away. Gentle, maybe. Probably. But she should have told him to leave her.

He would have. He would do what she said. He would do anything she said.

Jesus fucking Christ, he's so pathetic. Look what she's done to him, look what she's _done,_ holding her tighter and shivering and gritting his teeth when she murmurs and shifts even closer to him.

She's close enough for him to reach up and snap her neck. Make it quicker for her than she has for him. That's kindness for you, bitch. Not months of this sick parody of life. That's _grace._

He tries to hold back a whimper. Fails and muffles it against her breast. He just wants it to _stop_. He wants to stop _thinking these things._ Like biting his fingers, like the pleasure of chewing apart his own skin, the sweet crunch of crusted blood between his teeth. Hates it. Wants to stop. Wants to do it, all the time.

But she said he would get better.

She can't be lying. Please, she wouldn't do that to him. He can trust her. Even if he can't trust any of the others, he can trust her.

But he did, and look what she did to him.

(Very little about his memory of that final ten seconds is clear. His brain has concocted several different versions of it suited for several different states of mind, but in each version she's the center, and in each version she's irresistible. In all but one of them, his own agency is absent from the equation. She's the force that drags him forward and into the path of the bullet, and the only difference regarding that variable is whether or not he wants to be there. The one version of events where he allows himself any measure of agency - where he allows himself to understand what happened as a choice he made - is a version he lost weeks ago in the labyrinth that is his imagination, and he no longer recalls that it exists at all.)

(It does still exist.)

She didn't ask him to leave. He's here.

He's an utter piece of shit, he's disgusting, he's nobody, he's _nothing,_ but she didn't ask him to leave. She held onto him. She's holding him now.

She said he would get better.

He can breathe her in. If he can have what she's already given him, if he can be with her like this, surely he can take a tiny part of her for himself. Surely she won't miss it, and surely she wouldn't mind even if she did. He's not stealing. He has no right to it but he never would have believed he had one.

He has no right to anything.

But he can. He can do it. He inhales, pulls her into his lungs and keeps her there - the fresh scent of her skin and her hair, lighting up behind his eyes as every synapse shudders.

He has her. He'll hold her and keep her. No one will ever take him away from her again.

No one will take her away from him.

He'll make sure of that. The delicate arrangement of her beauty. He's so attentive to the details. Lying like this with him, so silent and still, and all warm. All his. Like she should have been - lying with him in the dark. Lid closed and safe, smell of her clean skin. Her blood. Holding onto her while the death-storm rages outside. Like it was supposed to be.

Finally.

Through the pain, he smiles. He dreamed she was beautiful and so she is.

* * *

She opens her eyes into thin dawn light - no brighter than the lamp she left on - and she's not alone.

She couldn't really be less alone.

It's new. There aren't many things left in the world that are new to her but this is one. It's not like she's never slept close to anyone - she and Maggie were practically sleeping on top of each other before the prison, huddled together for the illusory feeling of security far more than for warmth. But not anyone aside from that. She hasn't woken up with a body pressed tight against hers, a body that's technically bigger than she is but which still feels small, almost fragile. She hasn't woken up with her cheek against the top of someone's head, hair tickling her nose. She hasn't woken up to arms around her, a leg slid between hers, slow breathing, a heart thudding against her ribs that doesn't belong to her.

But there were times.

It's not the most convenient context for the memory to crash back into her, but here it is. It's been a while since she's thought in much detail about those days after the prison fell - she has more than enough bad to focus on in the here-and-now - but some things are piercingly clear and all at once this is one of them. Not even one thing; a series of them, a collection of moments - mostly after the shack - where she was curled up by the fire and he was on watch, staring into the flames, and in that drifting fog between waking and sleeping she felt the strange urge to get up, to go over to him, to lie down beside him and put her head in his lap, and maybe he would stroke her hair until she fell asleep.

It wouldn't have to be complicated. It wouldn't have to be a big deal. It wouldn't mean anything other than a huge portion of what drove her toward him in the first place, which was a desperate need to _connect,_ to be _with_ him since she was stuck with him. She was with him in those first days but she was also _alone,_ and lonely, and even after things started to get better, sometimes she lay and watched the firelight play across his face through half lidded eyes and she still felt that way.

He was so close. But he was slightly wary - of himself more than her, she was almost certain - and very shy, and he was so far away.

Then he started to touch her and she thought _Maybe._

Maybe _._

She blinks into the light easing in through the window, her fingers tangled in his hair, and she thinks about a coffin that was the comfiest bed he'd had in years, and how much later, alone and sleepless in the dark, in a cold hospital bed in a place she didn't belong, she took herself back to that room and that coffin. And when she was done playing she got up and went to him, lifted herself in with him, settled against his side and put her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest, and let his heartbeat lull her to sleep.

And she did sleep, then.

She went back there more than once. It wasn't sanctuary but it might have been the best she could do.

Now this.

Her arm is mostly asleep and her spine is curved in a way that isn't entirely natural, and the shorter bits of his scruff are starting to rub uncomfortably against her bare skin, but now apparently there's this. Everything that came before it, as well - the light of day beginning to wash across it, sharpening its shape. Its implications.

He came to her. He talked. He was _there._ He was _with her._

He wants to get better.

She closes her eyes and breathes.

But then abruptly he's shifting his leg out from between her knees, lifting his hand away from her hip, pulling back enough to look at her. His eyes are clear, alert. He wasn't asleep.

She wonders if he slept at all.

For a long moment he says nothing, and though the light is behind him, throwing his face into shadow even as it glosses strands of his hair in a weird kind of silver, his eyes aren't dark. They're not pits and they're not dead, and he's not terrified. He's confused - always - but beyond that she doesn't know how to describe what she thinks she sees on his face. Only he hasn't yet looked at her that way. Not since he got here.

She's not sure he's ever looked at her that way since she's known him.

"I should go," he whispers finally, and despite its softness his voice jars her and she sucks in a sharp breath. He doesn't appear to notice, but then the warm weight of his hand returns to her hip and apprehension plucks at his features. "Y'alright?"

It's him. Fuck, it's _him_. And it's not, and she can't keep thinking this way, and she can't stop. Somehow she manages a nod, and it might even be convincing.

"It wouldn't be… good. If they knew I was here. Like this." The words come slow and haltingly but there's no doubt in them, and he shifts further away from her, almost to the edge of the bed, sitting up and rubbing a hand over his face. Looking at her when he lowers it, and now she can put a name to at least one of the things she sees there. She _has_ seen it before. Just not like this. The last time she saw him, before the hallway.

Wonder.

He's also _right,_ and she pushes herself up, nodding again and brushing her hair out of her eyes. It wouldn't be good. It already wouldn't have been good if someone knew he came here the way he did, to see specifically _her_ , but that he spent all night with her. That she let him.

They wouldn't even fully understand _why_ it struck them as wrong. They would just know that it did, and it would be difficult, and that's so deeply unfair when all he wanted was to not be alone with the hell in his head.

They want to help him and she's not sure how well they can do that, and it's no longer just because they can't scan his brain or will eventually run out of medication. She's not a goddamn doctor, she never even got out of high school, but if he's reaching out, to _any_ of them…

That should be enough.

"I'll go," he murmurs, but he doesn't move. He's utterly motionless, gazing at her, and she gazes back and holds her breath. And when he speaks again she can hardly hear him.

"Thank you."

"It's alright." Once more she touches him without thinking, leans in and covers his hand with hers. He looks down at it, brows slightly drawn together, but otherwise he doesn't seem to regard it as extraordinary. "Like I said." She smiles, and it's very small but it doesn't feel forced. "I wasn't gonna just leave you out there."

She walks him to the front door, both of them padding nearly silent on bare feet, and when they reach it he turns and faces her and she would swear he's about to say something. Or is trying to work up to it, trying to scrape together the words he needs to carry his meaning. His jaw is working slightly, and as she looks up at him he lifts his hand to his mouth and gnaws at an exposed patch of thumb.

She doesn't try to stop him.

"You can come back," she says softly. It's not really a decision she made. It's just true, and it also feels like it was true a long time before this. "If you need to. If… If somethin' happens and you don't wanna be alone."

For another extended moment he doesn't respond, simply stands and chews his thumb and looks at her. He still might be about to say something. But then it passes and he doesn't; he lowers his hand and ducks his head, turns back to the door and opens it.

Everything is wet and glistening, the lawn all glittering drops cascaded over the grass. The air is cool and fresher than it was, as if the rain - rain she doesn't at all remember, rain she must have slept through - washed it clean. He pauses again in the doorway and she sees him close his eyes and lift his face into it, breathing deep.

He can be all right. It's possible that right now he is.

It won't last, but that doesn't make it less true.

Without another word to her he walks across the porch and down the steps and the walkway to the street. The sun hasn't yet made it above the horizon, and he's a dark shape in a world of black and slate blue, swift and silent. Sneaking out of her bed and back to his as if he came here for a very different purpose, and something very different happened.

If she wasn't so tired she would laugh. If a lot of things were different she would laugh.

She's not due on the wall until noon. She goes back to her room.

But she doesn't sleep. Which she's not fully prepared to consider a bad thing. She always has her most disturbingly psychedelic dreams in the small hours, and the sheets smell like him, and if she did sleep now she's uneasy about what could be waiting for her in the recesses of her own mind.

She lies on her side and watches the sun rise, turning over and over the memory of the comfiest bed in years and a living man sleeping in a coffin, and how after he died that seemed like the cruelest ironic foreshadowing imaginable.

She had no understanding of _irony._ No understanding at all.

* * *

He doesn't sleep. Didn't much, or doesn't think he did, because he remembers long stretches of nothing but the gentle thump of her heart against his ear and her fingers moving drowsily up and down his spine. He remembers wanting to look at her and not doing so, because if he moved too much he might wake her and if he woke her she might tell him to go.

 _God, not yet. Not just yet._

Rough pavement against his heels, then cool lawn though he could just as easily walk on the path, then back inside the sleeping house, wiping his feet carefully at the door to avoid tracking in stray blades of wet grass and brown fragments of leaves. Better if they don't know, not only that he was with her but that he was out at all.

Hiding from them like this. It feels strange. Feels like something he shouldn't have to do, something he should be angered by, but he can't muster the anger. Doesn't matter right now. What matters is that his head is quiet and his sky is clear and even if he didn't sleep much he has no idea when he last felt this rested.

His head was still vomiting ugliness behind his eyes. It was bad. But it was also better.

A little.

Down the dim hallway just the same as hers to the room that's a mirror image of the one he spent the night in - except for its contents, since he has a dresser and a lamp and a bed but the bed is stripped bare and the dresser is mostly empty and he's curling up in a corner in a nest of sheets and blankets, dragging a pillow close and holding onto it as he closes his eyes. Except for everything important. It's not the same as hers. Nothing about this is the same as hers, as what he was allowed into and what he just left.

But this is not all there is.

There's more than this room. There's more than this house and these people he knows he once considered family and now barely trusts. There's more than this fucking place, this walled insanity that burns and burns, these people who should be dead and deserve to die and who in fact would be better served by death than living in a world where they fundamentally do not belong. And there's more than what's _outside_ the walls, more than searing sunlight and freezing rain and hunger, sickness, pain, running and screaming and death death death all around.

There's more than the cracked interior of his skull and the infection boiling there, swollen to bursting.

He's not trapped. He might feel like it sometimes but he's not. Or at least he's not completely without options. There are other places. They exist. Might do fuck-all to help him in the end but he's not and never has been sure what end he wants and it's good right now to merely know that they're _there._

It's good. It's a good thing.

A patch of sun glides across the floor toward him. He draws his feet up under the blanket and watches it for a while, tracks its stealthy approach. Being stalked by the light. More than once it's actually felt that way: Dodging and outrunning a roaring sun with a mouth full of sharp teeth like a rabid lion, knowing that he'll tire and falter and fall and the light will just keep on coming and blister his skin, crack it, peel it away.

But now he watches it come and he doesn't need to escape it. Maybe it doesn't mean him any harm. It's possible.

Just before it reaches him he closes his eyes and presses the tips of his fingers to his lips.

He doesn't bite them.


	14. if I could start again

I just want to take a second to thank the people who are spotlighting the prose as stuff they're particularly enjoying, because it's something I'm having particular fun with, Daryl's POV specifically and especially. It's a fun challenge and actually in some ways easier sometimes for me to try to capture that feeling of distracted, fragmentary mental processing, while at the same time making it make enough sense to follow. Not too much sense. If you find yourself confused by it, that's exactly what you should be feeling, because _Daryl_ is confused.

Especially in this chapter, where I include more dialogue from his POV than I have before. You'll notice that in scenes with Beth - which is where most of the talking has been happening - we're never in Daryl's POV. That's because I literally can't get into his head when that's happening, at least not right now. It's a bizarre feeling, that he is actually making himself impenetrable.

But I _can_ get in there when he's talking with other people. So that's fun. And as I said, potentially (intentionally) very confusing.

Anyway, shutting up now. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 14: if I could start again, a million miles away**

 _Your name like an animal covered with frost, your name like a music that's been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails in wind and the slap of waves on the hull of a boat that's sinking to the sound of mermaids singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple profound sadness when it sounds so far away._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

So he wants to get better. He told her. He does.

He has no idea how that might be accomplished.

He's been spending the majority of the time in his room, a lot of it semi-conscious. Some of that is how bad his head is right now, how frequently the storms come - he doesn't remember it being like this when he was out there although his memory is not a thing to be trusted any more than the rest of him - and the pills he takes for it make him drowsy. Which is a mercy, when he can sleep through some of the pain. A temporary escape is still an escape of a kind.

But it's also that he just doesn't want to be in the rest of the house. Doesn't seem to be a point, being out there. He's not useful for anything and at least half the people making their home here at the moment - he strongly suspects that Carol doesn't actually live here regularly, which means she's here for _him_ and he has no idea how to feel about that except that he thinks he doesn't feel good - don't like him and probably don't want him there.

The Boy doesn't. Which is fine, but it's still true. _Michonne_ is someone he's less sure of, but when she looks at him he senses a discomfiting combination of sadness and mistrust, and he doesn't like how that makes him feel either but he also doesn't - he _doesn't,_ there's no point in pretending he doesn't give a fuck about this now - want to make her feel that way.

So maybe it's better if he's just not around her most of the time. Maybe better for her.

There's Rick. Fucked that up. He knew he was fucking it up then and he has and he's guessing nothing there can be repaired, not that it was in good shape to begin with. Now Rick has trouble looking at him. It's not only shame, but it's shame. He shamed Rick, he _hurt_ him and _deep,_ and that makes him happy because fuck Rick, fuck Rick to hell and back, but it also doesn't make him happy at all, and he looks at Rick and he has to look away too.

Hurting people doesn't make him feel as powerful as it usually does. Doesn't give him even the illusion that he's in control of anything.

Nothing there is all right.

There's Carol, who does like him, who has helped him and taken care of him to the extent that he's been willing to allow it, and she's kind to him and she pushes him but it's not as bad as it could be, and when she touches him he doesn't want to tear her hands off at the wrists and shove them down her throat.

He's not sure he _likes_ her, not even now. But he doesn't hate her.

And once he did like her. He remembers that too. Once he liked her very much. Lost her, he thinks. Lost her and fucking _Rick did that too,_ Rick sent her _away_ because Rick is a manipulative _asshole_ who can't be trusted, but then he found her and he remembers running to her when he saw her that day, running to her through the dappled sunlight and just about lifting her off her feet, he hugged her so hard.

He remembers that but it's gone. He doesn't want that now. He thinks about hugging her and his muscles wrench as if they want to rip their way out through his skin.

And there's the Baby.

He hasn't touched the Baby since the Baby and the Boy came back. He's barely been in the same room with the Baby - no small feat, because Carol spends a lot of time taking care of it, but he's managed. There are a lot of things here he has difficulty facing, but somehow the Baby is one of the worst, and when he sees the Baby it reaches into the deepest shadows in him and seizes something and begins to drag it toward the light. Dragging it like a heavy sack.

A sack in which something is moving.

Doesn't want to see it. He thought of a thing crawling out of it, eyeless and covered in oozing sores, mouth gaping and tongue unrolling like a bloody carpet, limping toward him and hissing his name.

But he wants to get better.

And _she_ let him stay with her. She didn't tell him to leave.

He comes out of his room late in the morning to eat lukewarm scrambled eggs and then he stays, sitting at the kitchen island and watching Carol put away clean dishes.

He surprised her a little by asking her for tea. He thinks he surprised her even more by making it himself. Since he got here he's bathed himself semi-regularly, dressed himself, been functional at what he knows is the level of a competent child, but he hasn't done much more, and any kind of food preparation has been completely off the table. He hasn't wanted to, hasn't felt like he should be that embedded in the workings of a household in which he's not welcome, and also he's felt like it might be a good idea for everyone concerned if he spends most of his time well removed from knives.

But he wants to get better. So he makes tea.

They have a box that it looks like no one has dug into in a while; there's lemon and there's mint and he takes the mint and it does something to his sinuses that he likes. So that's good. And he sits and drinks it and watches Carol, watches the sun move across the floor, and he doesn't know if it's making him any better but he actually doesn't feel like it's making him worse.

Almost thought it would. Seems so far outside anything his world has been. Crouching over campfires and gnawing flesh off bones that's often charred and often only half-cooked, and not caring. Licking blood off his fingers. He still eats primarily with his fingers but it feels and _is_ endlessly more civilized. But this is just.

This isn't him.

But maybe it could be. If he tries.

Carol remarks on this. Casually. She's not making a big thing out of it and she's doing so with careful intention. He identifies this as edging in the direction of manipulation but it seems benevolent so he lets it go. Yeah, well, he's getting tired of being cooped up in that fucking room all the time. Yes, he's the one doing the cooping. That's beside the point. He wanted to be outside. Here he is.

Outside? She gets thoughtful and internally he rears back. No, he didn't mean that. He's not sure whether or not he actually says it but if he did she either didn't hear him or she's ignoring him. How does he feel about getting out of the house some? Yes, there's the back porch, but the rest of the place is pretty nice. Better than the prison ever was. There's a big garden. They have some animals now - something the group has been helping with, since most of the other people here would probably get a hog killed if they tried to take care of it. And yes - and here she turns and looks him right in the eye, and it's not the first time it's happened but he feels like he's _seeing_ her, really seeing her in a way she often doesn't let herself be seen - they're full of shit, most of those people. They're clueless. But some of them are beginning to acquire a clue. Slowly. And she believes that generally they mean well. A lot of them are at least bearable.

He meets her eyes and then he breaks and looks away, at the window and the light, down at the tea. Won't tell her about the moon and the cool of the grass, the pavement pleasantly rough under his bare feet. The breeze and the stillness and the shadows through which he can move. The girl in the light at the other end. Resting in her arms. Being almost all right for a while. He won't tell her about that.

Hates that he won't. Hates that he's not looking at her now.

Mutters. Maybe. Maybe he could do that.

He'll think about it.

But then as she's turning to a cabinet full of plates he swings his gaze back to her and the words come: They don't like him. The people here. He saw how they looked at him when he walked by on his way to the house. They put him in that little room first, locked the door and he knows he was guarded. He tried to kill two of them with his hands and his teeth. Yes, he was trying to do that. Or he wouldn't have had any problem doing so. He can't imagine that they're feeling particularly warm toward him. He can't imagine that they trust him worth a damn.

She pauses, doesn't turn back to him. Hands on the counter. Tense set of her shoulders. He's not wrong. He knows he's not wrong. But they just don't know him, she says. All they know is what they've seen, and yeah, what they've seen so far isn't exactly great.

If he showed them something else, that might change.

What the fuck else does he have to _show_ them? Not angry, not yet, but impatient and not hiding it. Raising his voice a little. She doesn't flinch but when she glances at him her jaw is tight and that just winds up the coil in him even more. What, is there some kind of _softer side_ he can put on display for them? Some way in which he can prove that he's nice and approachable and not dangerous and not totally willing to murder any of them? Some way he can prove to them that he won't tear down their curtains and rip up their furniture and take a shit on their carpet? Prove that he's housebroken?

Okay, yeah, angry now. He's angry and his fists are clenched on the island and he feels scabs cracking and pulling free, and he's sick of it, utterly fucking sick of the bad joke of trying to _let them heal_ when he's just going to bite them to ragged stumps again, and all at once he's tearing off the bandages and hurling them at her, raising his hands so she can see, making her look at the stripped cuticles resentfully scarlet and swollen - maybe getting infected anyway - and the jagged edges of his fingernails and the raw exposed quick where he's bitten them back too far, the places on his knuckles where the gnawed, picked places are broken open and bleeding.

Look at this, you stupid bitch. Look at this and tell me I can show them something else. They'll see this and that's all they'll see.

Yanking his hair aside. Exposing the place on his brow where the bullet blew him apart. It's tiny but it's huge. It's open and gaping, festering, and flies have laid eggs in it and maggots are wriggling in his decaying brain tissue, and ants are carrying it away piece by piece. It's enormous. It's all of him. It's impossible to miss.

 _They'll see this and that's all they'll see._

Stops, breathing hard. She's just looking at him. Not at the crumpled bandages at her feet. She's looking at him and there was one time she looked at him, the first time like this, on the farm when she came to see him after the little girl came out of the barn and it was like a bolt in his chest, and he hurt her because he was hurting so bad and she made him _care_ and it was her fault and nothing was worth _shit,_ and she looked at him with tears in her eyes, tears he put there, but she didn't go.

He stepped toward her and she flinched and he could have died. He could have died, seeing that.

He doesn't think she would flinch now. He thinks she would probably put him right on his ass. He drops his hands and stares down at the floor.

He's not better.

Very quiet. Not cold, but it's like steel slamming down all around him, every word. Ruthless. She's absolutely ruthless. Is that all he sees?

Fuck you. Still not looking at her. Fuck you. He slumps toward the island's counter and leans his elbows on it, covers his eyes with the ruins of his hands. Covers his face. He can't do this. It's not him. Not anymore. Just. Just fuck you. He wanted to get better and this is what happens when he tries.

And she says he told her once that he was _trying,_ trying to start over. And he wasn't wrong, he told her that and she saw how strong he was, and that's when he realizes he said it aloud.

He moans and doesn't answer.

He's right here. Softly. Almost gently, she says it. He's right here and he's trying.

But he's not that person anymore, the one who said that. That person died instantly of a gunshot wound to the head. That person got left in the trunk of a car and is still there, a pile of half liquefied flesh and bone in the late stages of decomposition, and he's just what rotted off and crawled out.

Eyeless. Covered in sores and open infected wounds. Tongue lolling. Dragging itself all the way here and sitting in the kitchen and trying to hurt her for no fucking reason.

No, he has a reason. She's close and now she really is gentle. Not touching him, and for that he's vaguely grateful. He has a reason, just like he always has a reason when he does this, and he only ever does it when he's in pain. _He's_ hurt. He's sick. That's why he's doing it.

It's not his fault.

Yes, it is. She shouldn't talk about this like he has no fucking choice. He has a choice and he's making it. He's making it every second. He means to do everything he's doing.

Maybe. But he never would have wanted this to happen to him. He never would have chosen how things went.

Drops his hands and looks at her. Not sure how she can be saying this. Not sure how she can be this dense. Because he did. All at once there it is, suddenly emerged like a truth he knew and forgot. Hard, sharp edges. He did choose it. He had a choice and it was a clear choice and this is what he chose. He did this to himself and there's no one else to blame.

He shoved her out of the way and stepped into the path of that bullet. Took it for her. And he's seen her, she's _right here,_ and she's whole.

He thinks Beth is whole?

He blinks. She still has all her fucking _brain_ and he's guessing that most if not all of it is working correctly. Yes, he would say that she's whole.

He would be wrong, then. She's not whole.

 _Daryl, she hasn't been whole since she watched you die._

Silence.

More: He didn't see Beth after. He doesn't know what all these weeks have been like for her. These _months._ Yes, she survived. That's about all she's been doing. Something in her broke when they left Atlanta, left _him,_ and it's never been fixed.

 _She blames herself for what happened. She never actually said so, but she does. On her worst days she feels like she might as well have pulled the trigger. She holds herself responsible._

 _So does Rick._

 _So did Tyreese._

Tyreese. He knows that name. Frowns, scrambles around for it, roots through the mound of scattered paper, looking for the right file. Tyreese. Prison. Was with Carol for a while, after. Sister, Sasha. He hasn't seen Sasha. He hasn't seen Tyreese.

Tyreese _did._

Tyreese is dead, isn't he.

Yes, he is.

Who else is dead? He's mildly stunned. The world has suddenly expanded, snapped wide, and he's standing in the middle of it and looking around, bewildered, trying to organize his perception of all this new input. All these new things he has to take into account. Everything that isn't in front of him and around him. Everything he doesn't see.

Who else is dead? Because that can't be it. They can't have gotten that lucky. People die all the time.

He would know.

Noah is dead. He must look as blank as he feels in response to that, because she clarifies: Noah from the hospital. Dawn was going to keep him. That's why Beth tried to kill her.

Oh.

Well. Good.

She doesn't say anything to that.

Tyreese didn't deserve that, though. Tyreese was… Tyreese was like Beth _,_ a little. Tyreese was trying to save people. Believed they could. Rick just wanted to kill everyone.

Yes, but he blamed himself. It was his plan. _And you backed him._ At least that's what Rick said. Tyreese wanted everyone to get out safe and you backed him and look what happened to you.

It wasn't his fault.

Maybe not. But he still thought so. It was ripping him up inside. _Everyone_ was getting ripped up. Everyone was broken after that. Not downplaying the hell he's in now, but he needs to understand. Everyone hated themselves for leaving him behind. They thought he was dead and they still hated it, and it just made what happened so much worse. Because it wasn't right. Because he deserved better than the trunk of a fucking car. They wanted to take him with them. They wanted to bury him. Put him in the earth. Lay him to rest.

They wanted a chance to say goodbye.

Everything went wrong. Everything. It technically could have gone worse but only in the most technical sense. The fact is that everything went wrong that possibly could, and nothing after that was all right. Nothing. Then they lost Tyreese, then Noah, and it was one thing after the other, and him coming back now… _That's a gift._

Even like this, even how hard it is, it's still a gift.

 _They don't think so._

They will.

Because he'll get better? Bitingly, bitterly sardonic. Nasty smile. Is that why? Because it's going to be _all right_ and he's going to _get better?_

No. Because he's right here. And he's trying.

That doesn't count for shit.

 _It might be all that counts for anything._

And he has nothing to say to that. Except he suddenly can't stop thinking of _her_ face. She refuses to leave him.

She refuses to let him leave.

* * *

He lets Carol rebandage his hands.

* * *

In the evening, after sunset but before it's fully dark, Rick says he's going to make a pass through the Zone, just walk around and see what he sees - mostly because it's a nice evening since everything blew clear - and maybe he could have some company.

He doesn't have to talk or anything. And it's fine if he doesn't want to. But Rick is going regardless, and Rick would like to have him along.

He wants to slam Rick up against a wall and punch him in the gut, carefully and repeatedly, until he throws up all over himself.

He says yeah. Sure. He'll come.

* * *

It is indeed a nice evening.

It's cool. The moon hasn't risen yet but it will before too long and it's as if he can already feel the advance of its light. There are other lights everywhere now, in almost all the houses, and the street is pretty much empty. A lot of people are having dinner, Rick says. A few people might be out and about, especially later, but for the most part this is a quiet stretch of the day. Everyone tends to adopt the same rhythm in a community like this. Even people with vastly different jobs who keep vastly different basic schedules. Glances over, quick. Does he remember that? The prison. same thing. Closer quarters then but the principle still applies.

Yes. He remembers.

He remembers that he always liked this time.

Down to the end of the street, turning onto the next one. More of the same. This is all part of the same development, Rick is saying. It's ridiculous, the timing of it. Just enough of it finished that it could support people, enough people to put up walls, do what needed doing to give it a chance. Thought it was ridiculous when the group got here, still does because it _is,_ but for now it also appears to work.

Watching it slide by as they walk. Watching the fire consume it. Eyeless creatures crawling out of the flames, skin burned away and sloughing off, exposing glistening muscle and bone. Crawling toward them. Following. Whispering all his secret sins. Of course not even Rick can see. Hear.

The words sting on his tongue: These people are full of shit. Pause, and Rick is watching _him_. These people are full of shit and they're already dead. All of them. They just don't know it yet. This place is already destroyed. They just refuse to accept it. It doesn't belong here. None of them belong here.

Rick is very quiet. Looking away now. No. No, it doesn't. Neither do they. Yes, a lot of them are full of shit. No, he doesn't expect this to last. He's not making that mistake again. Places like this never do.

So why the fuck are his people _here?_ Sharp. Not loud, not stopping, but throwing the words at him and intending an impact. Why are they participating in this absurdity? Fucking houses? _Lawns?_ Hardwood and area rugs and loveseats and glass coffee tables and tastefully painted walls, like something out of a fucking magazine? Granite countertops and all that stainless steel, all that chrome?

Because they were out there a long time. Almost too long. They needed to breathe and rest, all of them. Rick looking at him again now, half shadowed face. Eyes bright. He can meet that gaze but he has to work at it, gears grinding. None of this is going to last and they know that. When you have walls, all that means is sooner or later some fucker is going to come around looking to knock them down. Sooner or later it's going to come apart. But they can be ready this time. Or as ready as you can ever be for that.

Thought they were ready before. Look what happened.

Yeah. They were naive about a whole lot of things. They know better now.

Doesn't answer. Tired, and this isn't an argument he wanted to have anyway. He doesn't want to argue with Rick. Doesn't even really want to _be_ here, but he said yes.

Because he's _trying._

Rick turns them down another street, and there's two men sitting together on a porch. Porch swing. He recognizes one of them, can see even at a distance in the dusk. With Rick, out there where he found them. Saved his ass, though only because saving Rick involved doing so.

The man lifts a hand and waves.

Doesn't wave back. But Rick does.

It's absurd. It's bullshit. It is. Low, quiet. None of them belong here. Sooner or later they'll run. But for now there's a place for them here, and there's a place for him too. Even if it doesn't seem like it.

Wishes he'd brought cigarettes. Something to do with his hands. They're twitching at his sides, fingertips rubbing together. That's bullshit too. Plenty of people don't want him here. Would make him leave if it was up to them.

Good thing it's not up to them, then.

Doesn't matter. It's still fucking _bullshit._ Why the fuck is Rick trying so hard to sell him on this? Why are _any_ of them trying so hard? Since he got here they've locked him up, they haven't trusted him, they've tiptoed around him like they expect him to slaughter them if they put a foot wrong. None of them have truly taken him in. None of them have embraced him with open arms.

Soft: He isn't exactly letting them, is he?

Rick is welcome to eat his _dick._ For a change.

Rick appears to ignore him. Look, nothing about this is easy. Nothing about this is comfortable, or even particularly _happy_ in any simple way. It's painful and he knows that, and no, Rick _doesn't_ know how painful it is for him, can't even imagine what he's been through and how much it hurts now, but no one is pretending this is great. It's not. It's decidedly less than _ideal_ in every important respect.

It is what it is.

And having him here with them, now, is everything.

Silence.

Glenn and Maggie still haven't really seen him. They would like to, tomorrow. If he feels up to it. Then the others, as he wants. He can do this at his own pace. But people _want to see him._ They're freaked out, a _lot,_ and they might even be a little scared, but they want to see him. Because he's family and they thought they lost him forever, and he's here. And whatever else about this is shitty, that's true. So there's a place. There's a place for him.

He can belong.

Stops. Stares at him. Rick stops too, stares back. Doesn't fucking get it. Doesn't get any fucking part of it. Doesn't get that it's not possible, doesn't get that in the end _trying_ doesn't matter. Even if he does and even if he can, even if he _gets better_ , it doesn't matter. None of it.

Points to the wall. Them, out there. The sickness and the madness, thirst and starvation. Cruelty. Pain. Murder. Death. The walking dead. They belong. They're the only things that belong now. _We don't. We don't belong anywhere anymore._

 _The world belongs to them now._

Rick doesn't answer.

Never fucking mind. He tried but he's tired and his head is starting to hurt. He's done with this. He wants to go back.

Almost says _home._ Stops himself and feels kind of sick.

There's no such thing as home.


	15. what have I become, my sweetest friend

People have been asking me about the ending. If you know me, you know I am Kirkman levels of obnoxious about endings where a lot is at stake. So you know I won't tell you much. I won't tell you whether it's horribly tragic. I certainly won't tell you whether anyone dies, or who, or how, or what the nature of Daryl and Beth's relationship will be by then.

What I will do is get disgustingly hinty and tell you what I've already said on my Tumblr: That I know exactly how it ends, that it'll be bloody, and that people will die. And that I'm quite satisfied with it and believe it's the right ending.

See? Fucking _obnoxious._ Why the hell are you even reading anything I write? What's the matter with you? Jeez.

Thanks, though. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 15: what have I become, my sweetest friend**

 _Baby names, paint names, delicate names like bones in the body, Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing, names that no one's ever able to figure out._ \- Richard Siken

She isn't sure she should come. Suspects it might be a bad idea. But - apparently now true to form regarding these things - she comes anyway.

It's just the goddamn street. She's crossed it before, a hundred times. More. She's crossed it more than once since he staggered through those fucking gates. A lot of things are a big deal now, and that's appropriate even if it sucks and she hates it, but this shouldn't be one of them.

It is.

She trails Glenn and Maggie down the porch steps in the soft morning sun and she battles the embarrassingly intense urge to catch up and take hold of her sister's hand. In a way she never has in any of the other times she's taken the - almost certainly foolish - initiative and gone to see him by herself, she feels small, too young, way over her head and sinking fast with the pressure building around her. The thing is, she realizes as her feet hit the front walk, if she came alone like she's been doing, she probably wouldn't feel like this. Because it would be only her and only her to get hurt, only her to face his miserable, stupid rage and his fear and his despair. His insanity. The deadness behind his eyes. Less would be at stake.

With them, she potentially has to manage the unmanageable. She's a whole new card of the wildest kind. And Maggie dealt with her after Grady, took care of her and her shattered head and her own tantrums and periods of emptiness, but that hadn't been anything like this.

God, please let Maggie know that. Please.

At least this isn't something someone else decided. At least it's because Rick asked him if he could and if it was okay and he said yes. So some part of him is willing. Some part of him feels ready. Or wants to be. Wants to try.

Some part of him believes he can get better.

The asphalt stretches out like a desert, glittering faintly. It's almost pretty, and she watches it slide by beneath her as she walks, semi-hypnotized. She's breathing and she's calm, even if the lower part of her stomach is busy practicing all the varieties of knots that she knows how to do. She's all right. Last time she saw him, _he_ was mostly all right, or as all right as he likely can be. This is going to be fine. It's nothing.

It's everything. Everything is everything now.

Other side. She steps onto the sidewalk, biting at her lip. The house is looming in front of her like a tower. Her gaze drops; Maggie has taken Glenn's hand - or maybe it's the other way around - and is squeezing it tight, and Beth is slammed by a sudden vicious envy, hateful and gritting in her jaw, making the world pulse at the edges of her vision.

Maggie has a hand to hold. Fingers to interweave with hers. She gets to have that. She never lost it, not for good.

Maggie was never stupid. Maggie was never stupid and never got Glenn killed.

Beth stares down at her boots as they head up the front walk. A colony of little red ants have made a nest in a crack and swarm around it, industrious. Traveling along a clearly defined highway, carrying tiny pink pieces of something.

She looks a foot or so to the right. Dead squirrel in the grass, legs splayed and teeth bared. Ripped open, its guts tumbled out and gleaming slippery in the sun, and its fur matted with gore.

He caught squirrels for them. Not great but it was something when there was nothing else, and she was grateful for it. They sat by the fire and on one good night when his mood was favorable he told her about one of his few times genuinely lost in the woods as a child, lost for days and he suspects allowed to be so by parents alternately neglectful and cruel, how he was stupid-lucky enough to nab a squirrel but not competent enough to get a fire going sufficient to cook it, and he ate it mostly raw, so ravenous he managed to swallow down his rising gorge and the bloody meat along with it.

He laughed about it. Ruefully, shaking his head. He laughed in the way Daryl laughs, which is to say soft and not very much - whether he's bitingly sardonic or gently amused - and she laughed too, because it was comedy of the blackest kind. Yeah, they were out in the middle of fucking nowhere and as far as they knew everyone they loved was dead, and they were eating thin, gristly squirrel, but they had a fire and the meat was cooked through.

They had each other.

He laughed the way Daryl laughs, except Daryl doesn't laugh that way now. She's sure, without having to test and verify. He might still laugh, yes. It's possible. But not like that.

And then they're at the door.

No one knocks. She's weirdly glad of that. This is surreal enough and she doesn't imagine that would have helped. Someone must have been watching them come, because Michonne pushes the screen door open and steps aside with an unreadable expression, and Beth follows them through into the front hall.

Doesn't look at Michonne. Trusts Michonne to get it. To not blame her. She's not sure she really wants to look at anyone at all right now.

It _was_ better. If they're doing this now, maybe it still is. But it feels so fragile. Feels like every step she takes could break it all open and let something horrible wriggle out.

She keeps telling herself not to be afraid, telling herself she _isn't_ afraid, and it's all pointless in the end because she's never been more afraid about anything.

He's there in the living room, alone, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands - bandaged, and the bandages look fresh - hanging between them. He's probably alone very much on purpose, on the part of everyone else. He looks up when they come in, and Maggie stops dead, Glenn almost stumbling against her side, and her hands press themselves against her mouth, and Beth looks away at the same moment she sees Daryl do the same. She catches a glimpse of his face before it's no longer turned toward her, and it's tired and vaguely irritated and underpinned by that ever-present confusion, but just as he sees Maggie and Maggie sees him, it's a bitter, jagged pain the edges of which she can almost feel.

People look at him and they never just _look._ They always react. They often react in extreme terms. He doesn't get to feel normal. Even if he could, somehow, they wouldn't let him because they can't treat him as if he is.

It's not their fault. It doesn't make a difference. For a shard of a second she hates them - especially Maggie - and it's on his behalf but it's also simply because she has her own stockpile of hate now and it has to go somewhere, and only so much of it can be directed at herself.

Maggie lowers her hands and whispers a shaky apology. Daryl doesn't look at her. He's looking toward the entryway to the kitchen; someone is in there. Probably Carol. He's focusing in that direction because it's the least hurtful direction to focus in.

So they sit down. Them on the couch; she hangs back by the window. And for a long moment no one says anything.

Glenn clears his throat. "You look better."

Not a good start. Daryl huffs what might be an anemic laugh through his nose and doesn't turn.

No. He doesn't laugh like he did.

"I'm sorry," Maggie says again, very soft. "It's just… When you came in. We couldn't believe it. Thought it had to be a mistake. It's still hard to believe. Seein' you. Y'know?"

Daryl swivels his head toward her. The bitterness remains, sharp like the tip of a bolt in his dark eyes, but he's not cold. He's not gone. "Yeah. I know."

"We're just…" Glenn shakes his head slowly. Discomfort is laced through every single one of his muscles. Every tendon, every sinew drawn tight. "It's amazing. It's so amazing." He laughs, also hardly more than a breath. "About time someone came back instead of dying."

Something behind Daryl's expression sparks, and she instantly knows why. _Came back._ Assuming he did. Which must seem like a bad joke to him. It might almost seem like mockery, and from someone who should know better, because Daryl is perfectly aware that everyone is in the loop regarding _how he's doing._

It's dangerously plausible that they've forgotten how impossible it is to sneak anything by him. He sees everything, analyzes in seconds, draws conclusions. That might be even more true now than it was. _Something_ kept him alive out there, and it sure as shit wasn't _faith._

She closes her eyes. She has to be better too. For him.

"I'm workin' on it," Daryl mutters, and just like on the porch when he told her he was sorry for what he said, every cell in her body releases a breath.

 _I don't wanna be like this anymore._

"Rick's been tellin' us," Maggie says, and Beth can feel another one of those sparks and silently beseeches her sister to shut the fuck _up_ if every word out of her mouth is going to be one of the worst things she could reasonably say.

Not that there's really anything good to say here anyway. It's something to get through, at best.

"Yeah, I bet." Terse beat. "Rick talks a lot."

An extended silence, and it's pretty horrible, but maybe it's actually not as bad as it could be, and as she sweeps her hair back from her face and opens her eyes, Glenn speaks. Quiet and not quite rapid, and in the steady tone he uses when he's sure about something.

"I don't know what to say. I don't think anyone knows what to say. But we're here. We're all here. What matters is you're back and we're _here_ , and whatever else happens, that's not gonna change. All those people out there?" He points to the window. "We don't give a shit what they think. What they do. It's just you and us."

Maggie nods and lowers her head, stares down at her hands, and when she looks up her eyes are clear. "That's all it has to be."

For another stretched moment Daryl merely looks at them, jaw working very slightly and the tips of his fingers twitching. She remembers what he said - that it felt bad when he didn't bite them - and if he's kept them bandaged, he's possibly been feeling even worse than usual. But they _are_ bandaged.

He's trying.

Since she walked in he hasn't once turned his eyes her way. But now he does, and what she sees there is what she saw in the dimness of her room at dawn.

She had wondered if it was worse that she came with them. Now she wonders something very different.

"Yeah," he breathes, still looking at her. Unwavering. "Yeah. Thanks."

* * *

The rest of what passes for _conversation_ is horrendously awkward. But it's not a disaster.

Maggie and Glenn don't say much. Daryl says next to nothing. Beth says nothing at all. But there's no explosion. He doesn't disappear behind that hideous deadness. After a little while Carol comes in, bearing terrible coffee, and she doesn't say much either. Once in another life Beth suspects she might have forced something in a timidly placating way. But that woman burned away to nothing a long time ago.

They've all died, really. One way or another, they've all shed an old self like a skin, left it lying crumpled in a translucent pile and slithered away wearing something harder and rougher and covered in spines. It's only a question of degrees. Daryl simply shed a lot more.

Didn't shed. Had it blown out of him.

Eventually they get up. They've seen him, they've presented themselves for whatever inspection he cares to make, and there isn't much else to be done right now. And no one here is actually an idiot; they must sense that with him, right now, there's not much of a welcome to overstay. He might resent feeling as if he's being treated gently, but he'd resent feeling trapped and crowded a hell of a lot more.

They say goodbye. Maggie looks almost as if she might be about to hug him. Then she doesn't, and that's unquestionably the right move.

He wasn't wild about being touched before. She has to remember that.

After they leave the room she lingers. Maggie tosses her a look as she and Glenn head for the door, but nothing more. They can't police this. That's another page she's nearly positive they're all on. They can't police this, can't stick her wild card back in the deck, and they shouldn't try. She's not a little girl. Hasn't been in forever. And this…

Him and her, it's their business.

He gets up and slowly crosses the room to stand next to her at the window. She's mostly facing it and so does he, both of them looking out at the street and not looking at anything at all. The Zone is up and moving. A couple of people walking past with guns. Someone carrying a crate of something. Kid running somewhere.

"You do look better," she says quietly. In the periphery of her vision she sees him glance at her, quick and then away. Nothing else. Not even a grunt. It's impossible, just now, to know what he's thinking.

He does look better. A tiny bit. It's difficult to say exactly how, but he does.

But he doesn't seem to have anything to say, and she's about to offer her own goodbye when he speaks, his head down and hidden in his hair.

"You got my knife."

Her turn to glance at him, sharp as the jump in her gut. He hasn't said anything about it. She wore it the day she came to him for the first time since the cell and she made no effort to hide it, and he said nothing then. She didn't even catch him looking at it. She wondered later whether he even noticed.

But when he saw her at the gate. Oh, he noticed then.

"Yeah," she says, a word carried out on a sigh. "I do."

"You took it."

Still impossible to read him. Whether he's angry. Upset. Sad. Even a hint of something positive. Sometimes now it's as impossible for him to hide what he's feeling as it ever was, and sometimes now he's completely inscrutable, and she's frankly uncertain whether that's because he can genuinely hide it or because what's going on inside him in those moments can't be expressed via conventional means. It comes in raging storms or not at all.

She releases a shuddering breath. Suddenly her eyes are stinging. "Yeah. I did."

He says nothing. She thinks she might see a single nod. And she wishes she could tell him what it was like when she came back to herself after she saw the trunk slam shut on him, after they ran, when she was kneeling in the grass and clutching his knife like a talisman and sobbing so hard she almost vomited all over again, a delightful repeat of the parking lot, except there would have been nothing left in her to throw up.

She wishes she could tell him what it was like clutching his knife and knowing that it was all she had left of him and all she would ever have. All she could say goodbye to. And she couldn't bear to say goodbye. And she held it against her chest, cradled it and it was so heavy, and she thought _you stupid little bitch, you killed him._

 _You get to live with that now._

"I don't remember takin' it. I must have. I had it. No one else took it. I asked." She squeezes her eyes shut and bites down on her lip until she can open them again. "I was just holdin' onto it for you, after you came in. You can have it. I can get it for you."

Like it's hers to decide whether or not he gets it back.

"No."

She looks at him. Full on, not sidelong. He's staring straight ahead, staring at the glass, his eyes slightly unfocused and brow slightly furrowed. Thinking, maybe.

He's always thinking. She doubts he can stop. She suspects that might be part of the hell he says he's living in.

"What?"

"No," he repeats, and he turns his head, catches her gaze and holds it. Still unfocused, but he's _there,_ and before she can do anything he reaches across the few inches between them and curls his soft, gauze-wrapped fingers loosely around hers. Not really holding. But almost. "You keep it." He takes a breath. "I shouldn't have it. That ain't a good idea."

Unspoken but piercingly clear: _I'm not safe._

 _I'm not safe for you._

"Alright," she whispers.

Cradling it. Like his bleeding head, in the hallway. Like all she had left.

He nods again, and his fingers and his eyes leave her in unison. He's not gone, but he's not with her anymore, and wherever he's gone, it's a place where she can't reach him.

"Go." Another breath, trembling at the edges. "Please."

She goes.

* * *

Maybe it made him overconfident. Something he doesn't even remember feeling, ever; it's entirely possible that he's _never_ felt that way. So maybe he wouldn't know it if he _did_ feel it. Maybe he wouldn't know it if it smacked him upside the fucking head. He has to own that it's possible. That he was feeling that way, because he saw _Glenn_ and he saw _Maggie_ and the world didn't burst into flames, he didn't set it all on fire or try to murder them, like maybe he really could _be alright_. At least for a while. In a short stretch.

Maybe he could do some more stretching of his own.

 _Trying to be_ _better_ and experiencing miserable failure is bad enough, but it didn't really occur to him that trying to be better and experiencing a modicum of success might be even worse.

At any rate. Thought he could stretch and that afternoon he stretched and he fucking overextended, looking back on it and struggling to face it like it's beating him away, and feeling it that way with all the accompanying pain of severe damage to a muscle, because that afternoon the thing happens with the Baby.

* * *

They leave and she leaves and he stays there.

Stays for a while at the window, stands and looks out. Watches them cross the street. _Maggie_ is leaning on the man - _Glenn,_ he is - with her head on his shoulder and his arm around her waist, and he can't see her face, can't see either of their faces, and is glad of that. Looking at them when they were here was hard enough.

But he did.

Remembers them. Not only from _before_ ; remembers them from the gate. Coming in. They ran to him, ran _at_ him, and he was recoiling and ready to hack their fucking heads off, and what stopped him was _her._

That knife. His. He has no idea why that was so terrible. He doesn't understand why that particular thing broke into him, shattered his breastbone and caved his ribcage in, but it did. Maybe - later, thinking around its sides and edges like an animal he was stalking - it was that she had it at all, and he remembered it and the memory itself is what bludgeoned him. The fact of it. That there even _was_ a Before.

And she was carrying it.

Looking at it like she drew it and carved out his fucking eyes.

Had to reach her. Nothing else mattered. Had to reach her and touch her, touch it, touch that _Before_ , know that it was real and might still be, that he's not dead and he was never buried and part of him remained in the light. Had to reach it and collapse to his knees in front of her, this fire he tracked all the way from fucking Atlanta, and maybe with his face pressed into the warmth of her belly and her hands on his head like a benediction he could finally cry.

Had to reach her so he could get that knife from her, wrench it away and seize her by the hair and cut her fucking throat. Cut her throat and gut her like a squealing pig, slice open that belly and spill her intestines all over the clean, swept pavement. Cut her throat and then his own and then it would be over.

It would stop.

Honest to a shitty parody of a sadist god, he's still not sure which he would have done.

He supposes they aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Watching her back as she follows them. The way she moves - learned it so well before she was stolen from him. Shift of her narrow shoulders, roll of her full hips. A few months older and thinner, that hasn't changed at all. Her hair flashes in the sun. Watching her back and thinking about her hand, her voice, resting in her arms, taking her and clasping her to him and not letting her go.

Never letting her go.

He closes his eyes before he loses sight of her, turns away. Returns to the couch, falls slowly onto it, buries his face in his hands. Expecting his head to start hurting, storm blowing up; seems like it does especially after he pushes, stretches, does anything that strains him. But it doesn't, and he floats in his internal dark and listens to the birds trilling outside and the sounds aren't like needles punching into his eardrums. Listens to the sounds of people in the rest of the house, Carol doing something upstairs, Michonne clattering dishes in the kitchen, soft clump of the Boy's boots in the front hall and the breathy creak of the screen door's hinge as it opens and swings closed.

He's here.

Just for a moment, he feels it. He's here in the world and the world is insane and absurd and deeply irritating but it isn't full of teeth and trying to chew him to pieces, chew him up like he treats his own fucking hands. He's here in the world and that's all.

Might be enough. For now.

At some point he gets up. Wanders into the kitchen, hungry in a vague sort of way. There are strawberries in a bowl on the counter, and he catches Michonne's glance quick and pointed as a blade's stab before she moves out of his way.

Doesn't look at her. She's still difficult.

Doesn't want her to be.

Picks one up. Bites into it. Strong, sweet tang, makes his salivary glands literally ache with the shock of it and he closes his eyes. _Her_ and strawberries and he doesn't know why he connects the two but he does. Bright and sweet and flowing cool into his mouth, over his tongue. Soft flesh giving between his teeth.

Just for a few seconds he's unexpectedly lost in a sudden dense sensuality that washes over and consumes him. Pleasure, out of nowhere. So alien in its intensity that for those few seconds he can't breathe.

Voice behind him. Jolting him out of it. Eyes snap open and he sees the gauze on his fingers stained bright red. He stares down at it, replays the words in his mind. Gets them second time around and makes sense of them, wonders if he should respond and if so how.

 _You did okay in there._

He turns his head, half his face toward her. Half seeing. Half of him. Only.

He did okay. Repeats. She says it and he gives her half a shrug and gives himself another bite. Less intense this time. Fading. Now it's just food and he barely tastes it. World dulling around the edges.

He did okay. Okay, so that's a good sign. Does he understand? She was never gentle. Isn't now. He always used to respect that; he does remember. Not her essential hardness, because she's not always hard. But she doesn't fuck around. Doesn't waste a second on being less than honest. She's telling him, looking right at him with her hands braced on the island and her keen gaze scraping over him.

How much does he understand about this?

Turns fully and gives her more than half of himself. This is the most she's spoken directly to him, alone, since he walked through that door. Strawberry leaves between his fingers and he hears them rustle; his touch is a breeze. He cocks his head, considers her. Steel and stone surrounded by gleaming granite and stainless. Except she never hid her stains. Blood that won't wash off.

Saw that in each other. Sees it now.

He understands enough.

Does he?

Shrugs again. At present. Enough to get by. Why, is there something he's missing? Not sharp. She's not being sharp with him, except her eyes, and that's fine. She's talking to him and he isn't angry or lost or hurting too much, so he'll talk back.

He has to understand the good. In himself. He has to know it when he sees it. He does okay, he needs to be able to recognize that. Believe. He did okay in there. That means something.

Silence for a moment.

Okay. So maybe she can enlighten him regarding what it _means_.

She doesn't answer. Long time. He starts to think she might not, and crushes the little scrap of strawberry flesh in his hand. Her gaze flicks down to it, back to him, and she does answer after all as she pushes away from the island.

What it means is that this isn't over. How he was when he came in is not the last word. And to be honest, she wasn't sure. She wondered about him. Hoped but doubted. But she looks at him now and she doesn't doubt so much.

He's a tough motherfucker. One of the toughest she's ever known.

Pause, lengthy. Gnaws at his lips and looks at her and lets it play out. He has nothing to fill it with. Her words are lapping against him like waves on a broken rock. Give it a few million years and it might wear down to nothing.

Then she's not gentle. But something in her softens. More than that; breaks. He sees past into something else. Thought he saw sadness in her before so he avoided her for her own sake, but now he sees _pain,_ and he thinks about everyone leaving him and allegedly hating it, hurting, and possibly it's very slightly more credible.

Has no idea what to do with it. Rick's pain is a soft underbelly at which he can strike if it pleases him to do so. This pain…

He just stares.

He's a tough motherfucker. She swallows and he sees what are unmistakably tears shining in her eyes, and once again he wants to lock all the doors and set the house on fire with everyone inside. Better to burn than this. He bites down on his cheek until blood overflows the sweet of the fruit and hot down his throat.

He's a tough motherfucker and he's also a good man. Whatever else happened, whatever else he's done, she believes that. That didn't bleed out of him. That didn't die. He was a good man, one of the best, and he still is. Man like there aren't very many of anymore. That's still true.

That's what he needs to understand.

The knife block is directly in front of him. Between him and her. Her eyes flick to it, and he knows she knows.

And she doesn't move.

Gazes down at his stained fingertips. Scrap of flesh stuck to a loose flap of tape. So red.

Shakes his head. He won't dignify it with any more of an answer than that. This isn't a fight he wants to have. Like with Rick, he doesn't want any fights at all. Not right now. She's full of shit and she doesn't even seem to know it, but it's not his job to set her straight.

She'll figure it out or she won't.

He doesn't look at her. Doesn't speak. After another long moment he hears her moving to the doorway, leaving. Gone.

No. He doesn't understand. Neither does she.

* * *

Then, later that afternoon, there's Carol and the Baby.

He was on the back porch, smoking and staring into space and wondering if the distant rumbles of thunder in his head were going to get any closer. So far they haven't, and maybe he'll get through the entire day without having to deal with it, which will make it one of the few days since he got here where that's been the case. He doesn't think he would be grateful, because there's nothing to be grateful toward, but he'll take it. So he's heading back in, past the living room, and not everything is shit and he doesn't feel completely awful, and Carol is in there with the Baby.

Doesn't want to stop. Doesn't expect to. But he does. Slows and stops and stands there with his hand on the frame of the wide entryway and looks at them and can't look away.

Carol is Carol. Nothing unusual there. And the Baby is the Baby, there on Carol's lap in a shaft of early afternoon sun, but it's also all lit up and glowing, bright enough to make him blink, and that has to be wrong. One of those things Denise talked about where he sees it and no one else does, which appears to happen a fair amount, though he's certain that sometimes what he sees is real regardless of who else can or can't see it. Either way, that's just kind of how the world works now. That's a part of its foundational logic. He can roll with it because there's nothing else to fucking do.

But regardless. He sees it.

The Baby is sleepy. Blinking too, and then blinking at _him,_ staring at him with eyes like spotlights, and he stiffens and something like a sound far too low to be audible to human ears vibrates deep inside him.

In a shadowy corner of his mind, the sack is motionless.

Carol glancing up, also seeing him - faint smile, which he doesn't return, but he also doesn't _leave._ Isn't sure why not. He has no fucking reason to be here and every reason not to be. His policy when it comes to the Baby is one of the strictest avoidance possible, for the sake of the wellbeing of everyone involved. So smile or no smile, nod or whatever and get the fuck _away,_ go _literally anywhere else_ before the thing in that sack begins to stir, but no, _no;_ his feet are carrying him into the room, bare on the rough fiber of the carpet somehow jarring after smooth wood, and with numb horror he realizes he's walking toward them.

To do _what?_

No. No no. Just stop, please, just _stop_ and turn the fuck around and take himself away from this before something happens that he can't undo. Before he fucks this up so badly that.

He can't.

He's sitting down next to them. Angled toward them. Gazing silently at it. It's gazing back at him, eyes now wide and grave. Gazing at him like it knows. Sees. Sees him and is evaluating, coolly and without any form of bias. Maybe it remembers him. It's not impossible, because nothing really is.

And Carol is studying him, one brow raised the smallest bit, and it slips a little higher when the words slither out between his lips before he can stop them. Fumbling for them but they're slippery and they roll over his tongue and into the air and he can't yank them back. He listens. Barely recognizes his own voice.

So soft.

 _can I hold her_

Oh, God.

He has no idea how to read the expression on Carol's face. It's a cipher. It's a code for which he lost the key ages ago. Eons. Another fucking universe for all he can do with it. He has no idea what he wants now, no idea what he's feeling either. Terrified. Sick with it. Lurching and dizzy, seething nausea. Waiting for the flames and the rage and the black tar-stuff oozing down the walls. Waiting for the poison to boil through his veins. The storm to crash into his head, thunder cracking his skull and lighting stabbing through his eyes. Waiting to be the furthest from _alright_ that he can possibly be.

Waiting for the eyeless thing to crawl out and unroll that bloody tongue and grin.

 _can I hold her_ and Carol says _alright_ and then he's holding a warm little body in his arms.

He went so fast, on the run. He wasn't panicking, but he went so fast. Fast as he could. Wasn't losing someone else. Not this, not this tiny life that couldn't defend itself, couldn't feed itself, couldn't do anything for itself, so someone had to. So much death and killing and he was fucking sick of it, and here at last was something new.

Tiny life. Like a little flame that a swiftly closing door would blow out. Precious.

Went on a run and came running back, and he wasn't too late.

She looks up at him now. Holding her, so careful, and she looks up at him with her huge knowing eyes and her solemn face, and he has a dead man's arms with the memories of a dead man's muscles, and they remember how to hold a baby even if he's helpless in the face of the task.

Holding her and staring down at her and trying so hard to remember her name. Trying to find it in that enormous pile of loose paper. He has it. Somewhere. Searching frantically, throwing files and folders against the walls. Digging, cutting his fingers on sharp edges. Bleeding all over everything.

He _has_ it.

 _That's a good name, right?_

No. No, that isn't right at all.

He asked them for her and they gave him to her and he held her, so _small,_ that anything in the _world_ could be so small, and when he fed her she stopped crying and something descended like a gentle hand on all of them and everything was quiet. In that quiet brightness he held her and felt the rise of a smile and didn't fight it, and the shadow of death receded like a dark tide.

He fed life and it grew. Fed with his hands. His rough, thick, ugly hands. Torn now, bitten open and covered with cracked scabs, but he's holding her and she's not burning up or falling apart or dying.

He's holding her in his lap and she's lowering her head, yawning, to rest it against his chest. And he lowers his head too and smells her, clean baby and warm living, and she's so little but she's so much bigger than she was then. And he's saying something and Carol has to ask him to repeat it and he doesn't know if he does but it's possible.

He's saying something, grating in his throat, and he can't hear.

Asked Carl. Carl had a list, rattled them off. Didn't seem to really be sure about any of them. Seemed so tired, a strong boy's outward expression of sadness heavy like a shackled iron ball. Knew that, knew not to push. Leave the kid be. Let him rest. Something else in the meantime. Something like reaching upward, like a handhold. Like a hand.

 _That's a good name, right?_

And they laughed into the bright quiet and he made it brighter.

On his knees in that mental chaos and clutching a crumpled scrap of paper, spattered with red. Has it. Found it.

 _Judith._

The sack jerks.

Fuck, _no_. No, no, not when he's come this far, please, no, _let him have this a little longer,_ it hurts so fucking _much_ but please let him have it, he's been trying so hard, _please God_ , but it's shifting, wriggling, and fingers like rusty knives are scratching at the filthy floor of his skull as a sore-covered hairless head emerges and raises itself to grin at him with razor blades stuck into its bleeding gums.

Not eyeless, no. Gaping holes there and in its forehead, and black flies are pouring out and choking the air as it drags itself free and creeps toward him.

Arms tight. Everything. Rigor, so hard he might tear his own skin. Staring at the flowing floral pattern on the rug and losing himself in its lines and curves and starting to shake, saying something else. Trembling hiss under his breath, the breath he can somehow still claw into himself. Can hear it this time.

 _please take her_

Carol _didn't_ hear. Leans close and asks him. Says it again, is sure he does. _Please._ Warm little body in his arms, so fragile, and it would be so easy to hold her so much closer. Hold her very close. Hold her until her little bones snap like twigs and rip through her soft clean skin, until her little ribs punch through her little lungs and blood pours out of her mouth and nose, until her little skull cracks and her little eyes are crushed out of their sockets.

 _please take her from me_

Could be she still doesn't hear him. Could be she's just not fast enough. Could be both. His whole body is his teeth closing on sweet flesh and mashing it to paste, and it's a roar so loud it skins his throat raw and later he'll wonder dimly if the entire block heard him. What they thought about it.

What _she_ thought.

 _GET IT AWAY OR I'LL BREAK ITS FUCKING NECK_

Nothing after that. Except the Baby is gone. Carol is gone.

He's alone.

He's not alone. The naked, sore-covered thing sitting in the chair across from him, legs casually crossed, grinning its bloody razor blade smile as flies fill the burning room.

He looks at it and he lies down in the trackless desert his eyes have become and doesn't bother to wait for rain that won't ever fall.

Looks at the thing and its grin and whispers, choked. _I hate you._

It nods. Yes. Yes, he does.

* * *

That night Rick comes in.

Lying in the dark, curled on his side in his nest. Lying there for hours, staring at nothing. Listening to the nice normal stupid people outside wandering _home for dinner_ \- voices, laughing - and listening to the people in here doing the same. Except no laughing for them. Talking, hushed and tense. Couldn't make out what they were saying. Didn't want to. Talking about him. He knows it with bitter weariness and mostly doesn't care.

Mostly.

Lying in the dark too sick to be hungry, too sick to move. Thought about getting up later and hauling his carcass across the street, and maybe she would let him put his head in her lap and she would talk to him, or merely be with him in silence and send the rest of the world away by virtue of her ineffable grace, but he can't. Can't do that. He's not strong enough and her, this sweet girl who he saw cradling the Baby in her gentle arms more times than he can hope to count, the thought of her putting her hands on him in his filth and his infection sickens him even more. All he can do is lie here and watch the light die, until he's all alone in the shadows and the house has gone quiet.

Then Rick comes in.

Doesn't knock. Simply opens the door and comes in, moving slow. He's nothing more than a shadow himself, a thick outline of a body, walking toward him. Looking up - only eyes in motion - and wondering what Rick will do to the man who threatened to break his baby daughter's neck. Because this has to be too far. This has to be more than even Rick can take. And maybe it won't be just telling him to leave.

Maybe it'll be worse than that.

It should be worse. It should be so much worse. Whatever Rick does to him now, it'll be far less than what he deserves.

Lying in the dark, waiting for the tower of lurching drunken rage to crash through the door and drag him screaming across the floor by his hair, hurl him against the wall and howl at him all sweat and spit and sour piss and accuse him of all manner of unforgivable transgressions, and make him pay in flesh and blood for every single one.

Lying in the dark, waiting for Rick to punish him.

Rick stands there, looming, hands hanging at his sides. Silent. Breathing. Can't see his eyes, but can feel them. Fingers on pressure points. Teeth on his throat. He's shivering, realizes - can Rick see that? He's shivering, clammy with fear; he talks a big game but at the end of the day - quite literally - this is the truth. This is how it really is. Rick standing over him and him curled on the floor, shivering with his tail between his legs like a terrified dog.

Rick falls into a crouch, and he squeezes his eyes shut and readies himself for the pain.

The pain that doesn't come.

A hand. Hand on him, the side of his head - warm and heavy. Merely resting there. Not hitting him. Not choking him. Not ripping at him, twisting, trying to break him. Just _there,_ and now lifting and combing damp strands of hair back from his face, smoothing. Stroking him, so gentle. So soft.

 _It's alright._

He wants to hate this. He _should_ hate this. He should despise it, it should make him sick in a whole new way; he should jerk his head back and then lunge and snap his snarling jaws down on Rick's hand, take off a finger or two if he can. He is not housebroken. He is not tame. He is not this man's fucking _pet._

Not anymore.

But he doesn't hate it. He doesn't hate it at all.

 _It's alright, Daryl. It's alright. I know you didn't mean it._

He _did,_ though. He didn't want to. Didn't want to mean it. Didn't want to do it. Didn't want it. Doesn't want to be like this anymore.

He just wants it to stop.

 _I'm here, brother. I'm with you._

Huge breath, released. Another one. No more shivering. Just Rick's gentle hand, and he's not a dog. Not a pet. That's not what this is. This simply might be the only thing Rick can give him now. Might be the only thing he can accept. And he _can_ accept it. Uncurling beneath it, releasing again. The air is clear, and outside the moon is rising.

Rick sits next to him. Keeps stroking him. Doesn't speak. Doesn't have to.

It's all right.

Eventually he falls asleep.


	16. this thing is slowly taking me apart

**Chapter 16: this thing is slowly taking me apart**

 _Chemical names, bird names, names of fire and flight and snow._ \- Richard Siken

"Hi."

She doesn't wait for Rick to speak. Doesn't see the point. It's not like there's some kind of social nicety to adhere to, and if anything Rick will have been expecting her to know it was him and to know it before his second boot hit the platform. Would likely have been slightly discomfited if she hadn't.

They all know each other that well by now. Gait. The weight of footfalls. The rhythm. Breathing. Other things, things that can't be pinpointed but are nevertheless as profoundly unique as a voice. The way someone displaces the air by moving through it. The way someone clears space in the world for themselves by virtue of their very existence.

They all know each other that well by now because the alternative was knowing nothing. And then dying.

Rick is silent. Just stands behind her. She doesn't turn. Her rifle is in her lap but she's not holding it; she's holding Daryl's knife and a whetstone, and when she heard Rick climbing up to her she did so under the steady scraping of the blade across it as she sharpened and sharpened.

Hasn't missed a beat. The early morning sun gleams off it when it turns, when she turns it on purpose to catch and keep the light. Brilliant, making soft gold of steel. She carried it after Atlanta but it took her a week or so to work up to being able to look directly at it for any length of time, and after that she began to find it beautiful. Strong. Solid. Grip heavy but good in the palm and against the fingers, fitting even her much smaller hand. Nothing elegant about it, but effective in every important sense, and perfectly suited to what it was for.

She struggled to look at it because she looked and she saw _him,_ and then later for the same reason she sat by fire after fire and stared down at it, sharpened it, slept with it tucked against her chest.

She can feel Rick gazing at it. Following her movements.

"What d'you want, Rick?"

"Can I sit?"

His voice is soft, and she shrugs. He can do whatever he damn well pleases. And she's not exactly in a welcoming mood - likes early shifts on the wall because the world is quiet and for the most part everyone leaves her alone, not that they don't do that anyway - but the truth is that she doesn't really want him to leave.

In those days after, when nothing was right or good and that state had every indication of continuing, when she could hardly bear to be around anyone - and then Tyreese died and nothing was worth _shit_ \- it was somehow easier being around Rick than even Maggie. Not easy, no. She hated it, because she hated everything, and even left alone she was still stuck with herself. But given her options…

Given her options, with Rick it wasn't as horrible as it might have been. Because he was in the same place she was, inside himself. He just didn't have the luxury of letting it break him.

Later she wondered what kind of additional harm that lack of breakage might have done.

He sinks down beside her with a sigh, swings his legs over the edge in mimicry of her. She scoots a bit to the left to make room for him - more a reflexive courtesy than a practical concession of space, because there's no one within ten yards of them on either side. She shifts her rifle in her lap, settles the whetstone more firmly into her palm, goes back to her sharpening. He watches her sidelong, and she doesn't care.

"You didn't give it back to him," he says quietly, after a few moments of nothing but the scraping, and the sparrows and mourning doves in the trees, and the bloodless growl of a single walker staggering aimlessly toward the road.

She shakes her head. It wasn't a question. "No." She pauses. Her hands don't. "I offered. He said I should keep it."

Rick makes an _mm_ of affirmation and falls silent again.

This is not why he came up here. And he didn't come up here to _chat._ Rick doesn't chat. He hasn't since the prison fell, and he didn't do it very much even then. Rick - much like Daryl, in fact - speaks when he has something in particular to say, and otherwise he generally keeps his mouth shut. He's not exactly taciturn and he doesn't wrestle with words - in that sense very much _unlike_ Daryl - but he doesn't waste them either.

He came up here for something specific, and he'll either get it off his chest or he won't. That's not her business.

But in the meantime she'll sit with him and wait.

"He did pretty good yesterday." He shoots her a quick glance. "With Maggie and Glenn. I mean." Faint grimace. "Lot better than it could've been."

She rolls a shoulder, nods. He did. And it was much better than it could have been. She's not sure she can find it in herself to be grateful for it, but what she feels isn't bad. It's a little like thin sun off the edge of the blade.

"He held Judith, after," Rick says, and she jerks her head around to stare at him, knife and stone forgotten in her hands. He's looking back at her, outwardly placid, but it's only outward. Inside he's just as much of a mess as she is. Not that it's a new thing to see.

Then she remembers. Coming in later that night, how Maggie and Glenn were eyeing her. Like there was something they could have been telling her and weren't. It had been blindingly obvious, but she was tired and she didn't want to fucking deal with it, so she wolfed down some dinner and collapsed into bed and disregarded it until now.

"He," she breathes, and stops there, and he nods.

"Not for long. And it kinda…" His mouth twists and he looks down at his hands clasped loosely in his lap, at his dangling boots. "It didn't end so well. But he did."

"He wanted to?"

"He asked."

She has no earthly idea what to say to that. So she says nothing.

But then. _Didn't end so well._ And if it had ended _badly_ she knows someone would have told her, simply because no one would even attempt to keep something like that under wraps, and last night would have gone very differently and it wouldn't have been something she could ignore, but even if the conclusion isn't hard to draw, the question forces itself past her lips, backed by a dry croak that she hates intensely. "Is she okay?"

"Everyone's okay." Rick chews at his lower lip. "He just got upset. Yelled, ran off to his room, didn't come out again." Another pause - that she senses coming and doesn't break - and he lifts his head and gazes out at the ruined rooftops and overgrowing trees. "Y'know… Honest to Christ, I think what upset him most is that he got upset at all."

Of course. Her chest tightens, her hands along with it - knuckles pale around the knife's grip. Of course that would be the worst for him. Because it _is_ him in there, pieces of him, and he remembers. At least something. He wouldn't have asked, otherwise.

Wouldn't have reached out.

He was trying and somehow it went wrong, everything went bad inside him, and he would have hated that the most. Been frightened. Been ashamed.

With a sudden and horrible ferocity she wishes she had been there. For him. Might not have done any good, might have only made it worse, but she does.

"Did he say anything?"

Rick lets out a hard breath. Almost words inside it, and when no real ones follow, she knows it was bad. All the things Daryl could say, all the kinds of things it seems like he's made a habit of saying when he's swept away in one of those tornadoes of anguished rage - he always used words like weapons, this man to whom they never came easy, but now it's worse than it ever was and whatever self-restraint he had is gone.

So it was bad. Whatever it was.

"Said he'd break her neck," Rick says softly - nearly inaudible. He still isn't looking at her. And for the first time it genuinely comes to her that this is the most _human_ she's seen him in a long time, for this long a stretch. That his narrow-eyed animal wariness remains, that he'll bare his teeth and snarl when threatened, but that over the last week and a half something else has emerged in him and it hasn't receded. He was always softer around Judith, from the day he truly returned from wherever he had gone and took his daughter in his arms and on until now. When he has to stop being a man for a while and become something else, it's like he locks that part of himself inside her, a little breathing safe deposit box, and when he returns he takes it out and holds it close.

But Judith is the only one who really does that for him. Not even Michonne, whatever else Michonne gives him. However else she keeps him together, and however much he needs her.

Or Judith _was_ the only one. Because she looks at Rick, talking about Daryl, and she remembers all the times before, and it's piercingly clear.

And she thinks _this is dangerous._

"Do you think he meant it?"

Slow shake of the head. "I dunno. I…" He sighs and rakes stiff fingers through his hair. "I don't wanna think that. Fuck, you know I don't. But how he is…"

Another lengthy pause. She waits, listens to the leaves whispering, the frustrated groan of the walker below. She could shoot it. Maybe she should. But it's only one, and there's something almost sad about it, the way it's wandering aimlessly around. As if it's lost. Can't even focus on scent of the feast of living flesh just behind the walls.

"If he meant it," Rick says at last, "I don't… Y'know what, I don't think he was threatening. I think he was trying to protect her. Carol said he was upset even before he said it. Said he was sayin' something else she couldn't hear, before he started yelling. She said he seemed like he was scared. And before that, when he was still alright, he said something else."

She tilts her head, studying him. Set of his jaw, slight distance in his eyes. He isn't entirely with her. "What was it?"

"He said…" He closes his eyes. "She says he said _I missed so much._ "

"Oh," she whispers, and the world blurs away.

She didn't expect it, and she hates it as it's happening. She hates every hitching breath, every sob she fights back, every fucking tear. Resents it with an intensity that rolls her gut up like a windowshade, that burns in her like acid from her heart all the way up to the base of her throat. Like she's just vomited and all that's left in her is bile.

Like throwing up in the parking lot. Smell of death all around them, and imagining him rotting. Falling apart and not even feeding anything that grows green and alive. Rotting in a car, a man who belonged in the grass under the trees. The obscenity of it.

Now he's here and he's broken and he's trying and she's weeping for him, not for the first time but for the first time in front of someone like this, and gradually she realizes that Rick has an arm around her, that he's holding her against his warm, solid side with his lips against the crown of her head.

Like he did in the hallway. Just for a fleeting second but it felt like a ghost of home. Felt like hope. She hates it but all she can do is give up and lean into it. So she does.

And eventually she stops.

Rick doesn't say anything as she scrubs at her face, as she shoulders him clumsily away and scrubs again, wiping herself on the sleeve of her loose cardigan. She feels hot and swollen and irritated. The sun is higher and it's hurting her eyes.

"Y'alright?"

"No."

"Yeah." Rick draws a breath and leans back on his hands, face tipped up to the sky. "Yeah."

"He came to me the other night."

Rick's turn to look sharply at her but she ignores him, sniffles like a little girl and hates it all over again, once more swipes her sleeve under her nose. "When I was with him on the porch I told him he could come see me if he needed to. So he came. He was havin' a bad night. He just needed to be with someone."

She does half-face him then, meets his gaze levelly even though she's certain she's still a blotchy snotty disaster area. "It was fine. He was fine. We talked some, he went to sleep. He was…" Her eyes shift to the side, this time to what's behind the wall, to the gleaming roofs of the gleaming houses. Somehow it's not about the basic facts of the matter anymore. It's something else. It's his arm around her. It's _I missed so much._ "He said he wanted to get better," she murmurs. "He was… He was so sad."

Nothing. She can sense him thinking, sense its quality, its volume and density. Its gravity well and the way it pulls things in. The darkness down there, and the light he's desperately trying to feed.

They're all trying to save themselves now. But with him and her, since everything fell apart, it's always been different. The gravity well isn't his own. He's merely occupying it. At the bottom is a hallway, and a body, and blood.

"First time I've seen you cry in a while," he says finally, so quiet. It feels like a non sequitur and she blinks at him. He swings his gaze back to her and offers her the thinnest possible smile. "Really cry."

She clears her throat. It doesn't help. She's gratingly hoarse when she speaks. "The gate."

"When he came in? Don't count."

"Why not?"

"Just doesn't." He sighs, scratches his jaw. Stubble there - a few days since he shaved. A very distant part of her likes it. Prefers it. It's not even that it looks better on him; it simply looks more natural. Shaving seems like such a ridiculous luxury now. She still doesn't shave anything at all, even if a lot of other girls here do.

Once she had a tiny bit of a crush on him. It passed, faded, but she remembers it with a certain degree of fondness. Because in so many ways that was such a better time. When she could even _have_ crushes. When she was capable, before it was burned out of her.

Now she loves him. And that's worse.

"So we said you should steer clear of him."

She purses her lips. "You said."

"Didn't hear you disagree."

She shrugs. She can allow how that's so. She didn't disagree, then. She agreed wholeheartedly, even if she despised that she did.

"With how things went yesterday… And what you just said, and when you saw him on the porch…" He pauses a beat, jaw working. Rubbing at it again. Mulling. "Thinkin' maybe you should do the opposite."

Not entirely unexpected. But she hears it and knows it and she has no idea how it makes her feel. "What? Be with him more?"

Rick nods. "When you were on the back porch with him. And yesterday, by the window. Yeah, I saw you. I wasn't spyin' on you, swear." Another thin smile. She isn't sure she believes him, but it also doesn't particularly matter. "And if he was how you said when he came to see you- Beth, he's _talkin'_ to you. Like, actual conversation. You know how many other people he's done that with? Carol. _Maybe_ me, once or twice. But not like with you."

He gazes at her for a long moment, studying her, and she allows herself to be studied. She studies him right back. Still pensive, but there's also something brighter in him that she hasn't seen since Daryl came through the gates, and then she realizes what it is.

Hope. And not the desperate, self-deceiving kind.

 _Oh, Rick._

"Look, I…" Again he closes his eyes for a few seconds, appears to be trying to gather himself, looks back up at her. "After the prison. When you were first with him. How was he?"

 _No_. She grits her teeth. There are some things she'll talk about simply because she can't scrape together a shit to give, and some things it actually doesn't bother her to discuss - at least not so much - but this is not one of them. This topic is off-limits, and she thought she made that clear a good while ago. Without saying so, but Rick isn't oblivious. "I told you about that already."

"You told us what happened. The basics. You didn't tell us how it was. Beth. Please." He leans closer, and there's pleading in the hunch of his shoulders and his steel-blue eyes. "How was he?"

She ducks her head, a clench in her muscles beginning in her feet and working its way up her legs like fire. _How was he?_ That's a life story. That's a goddamn biography, and it's unfair to ask her to relate it - any part of it. She locks her fingers around the knife, watches the slight tremble seeping into her hand, then slaps it into its sheath and drops it onto the platform next to her and snaps the rifle up to her shoulder, her gaze like a bullet in itself down the sights.

It takes her a second to aim. Maybe less. She squeezes the trigger and the walker's head bursts open, and it goes down.

She's dimly aware of Rick's indrawn hiss. Doesn't look at him. Doesn't need to. No one talks about it, the way this little blond girl is among the most lethal of them. Killer hiding in plain sight - not unlike Carol when they first came in. Playing it sweetly harmless, until she decided she didn't want to play anymore, because there wasn't much of a fucking point.

Then the Wolves came and there was no point at all.

"He shut down," she says softly, flatly, lowering the rifle. Staring at the place where the walker fell. "We were survivin', but he was only goin' through the motions. I think for me. If I hadn't been there…" She shrugs. This is an ugly fact and there's no point in pretending it isn't. "He was just gone."

"How'd you get him back?"

"Fuck you," she says, just as soft, just as flat.

He doesn't answer.

"We got drunk." She raises the rifle again, aims, fires, and forty yards away a mourning dove tumbles bloody out of a tree. "We played a game. He screamed at me. I screamed at him. He cried. We burned down a house." She blinks, hard, but there aren't any tears this time. "So."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"You're full of shit."

She laughs as she settles the rifle in her lap. The sound is dry and heavy as an August drought and it cracks in her throat. "Not any more than you."

"Fine. Whatever. Look, Beth…" His hands grip at the edge of the platform and she looks down at them; long, powerful fingers flexed and clinging as though he's keeping himself from plunging into the sky. "I don't have to know what happened out there, with him. I don't have to know what you did or what you didn't do. That ain't my business."

"You're right," she breathes, ice. "It ain't."

He rolls right over her. "If you helped him once, I need you to help him again. If you can. He's gonna start workin' with Denise some tomorrow and we're gonna try something else later on today, but you… Beth, please help him. Please do that for me."

His tone was - to the extent that such a thing even exists anymore - normal, if rough. Tense. Now it's fallen and he's leaning close again, and what she sees on his face and whirling behind his eyes _is_ desperation, even if the hope is no longer the kind one forces themselves to have. He's not asking her. He's begging her.

"Please," he repeats, and swallows, and she realizes he's near tears himself. And she has no fucking idea at all when she last saw that in him.

No, she does. She knows. She knows exactly when she last saw him cry.

"I can't lose him again. I just… I can't do that."

 _Then you're fucked._ But she doesn't say it. Even if she tried she knows she would choke on the words - they're hideous words, sickening, and they don't apply solely to him.

She almost misses when she believed she had nothing left to lose.

She looks him in the eye and nods. It's not like she was going to answer any other way. She's every bit as fucked. Every little bit.

So she will.

* * *

Better today.

It's beyond belief. He's stunned with it, stunned when he wakes up and he realizes he slept through the night and stunned again when at last he ventures out of his room and no one treats him like a potentially rabid dog. No one does anything unusual. The Boy is gone but that's common enough, and he assumes Michonne and Rick are out doing whatever it is they do, but Carol is here and so is the Baby, and everything feels…

 _Normal._

For a given value of normal.

He genuinely expected to be ordered to leave. At best. Instead he eats a breakfast of cold venison and wanders a bit, wondering what the fuck is going to happen now. How he's supposed to navigate this. What sense he's supposed to make of it. If there's any sense in it to be made. Because he's experienced what he supposes he would call _forgiveness_ here, which is people not hurting him when he does something eminently worthy of hurt, but not like this.

Maybe Rick and Michonne will come home and everything will be horrible in a way he can deal with, that makes _sense_ , but for now every instinct he has - and he has very good ones - is telling him that he's all right.

He wanders the house and nothing is on fire. There are no insects seething across the floor, trailing his footsteps as he tracks sickness everywhere. There are no naked eyeless horrors grinning at him from the shadows and creeping up the walls.

It's just a house. That he's in. In which he exists, for the moment mostly without pain.

He wanders, but he doesn't go into the bedroom where he knows Carol and the Baby are. He doesn't want to be faced with that. It's too much, the Baby. Looking at that tiny body and what he thought about doing to it. What he might have done. Because he might have. He truly believes it. Rick said he didn't mean it, but Rick - and for once he thinks this with no anger and no contempt and only a dull ache in the core of his chest - is full of shit. Rick doesn't get it.

He really wishes Rick would get it.

He wanders and he wanders in his head, everything slipping into a calm haze, and after a while he doesn't keep track of, he's abruptly on the back porch with a cigarette in one hand and what he slowly recognizes as a book in the other, and he has to stop and work that over in his mind for what might be another couple of hours.

Fucking _book_.

What.

He was naturally aware that they're here, that the house contains them. Big shelf of them in the living room. He could tell with a glance at the spines that they almost certainly weren't placed there by any of _them_ and most of them probably haven't been taken down and opened since they moved in. Most of the titles were entirely unfamiliar to him, but it's not even about the content. It's about what they _are._ What they _mean._

Books are beyond absurd. Absurdity within absurdity, one of those nesting doll things only instead of wood they're all made of the utterly ludicrous. He can see burning books - good for kindling, sure - but the idea of _reading_ them…

What the fuck good is an unreal world now? The whole damn world is unreal. _Real_ is an outdated concept. It suggests that you can put anything into metaphysical categories, that it's worth the time, when all that matters is what keeps you alive and what fucking kills you.

(Nevertheless he has spent significant time on questions of metaphysics, even since the bullet destroyed the proper function of a good deal of his higher-level processing. Material reality is all he wants to deal with in any conscious sense, but he has spent evenings staring into dancing fires with the darkness screaming all around him, and he has wondered if there's any way to know for certain that he's truly alive. He has wondered if there's any way to know that he didn't die in the hospital, or isn't dying currently and merely experiencing a fantastically vivid hallucination. He has wondered if he's in a coma. He has wondered - more often than anything else, and with much less in the way of doubt - if he is in fact in Hell.)

(He doesn't believe in God. He also doesn't believe in Hell. He doesn't have to believe in Hell, because no faith is required when it comes to daily personal experience.)

Yet here he is with a cigarette dusting ash on the steps and a book in his hand, warm gentle breeze sweeping over him and tugging lightly at his hair. The book is small, hardback, feels good in his palm, and his bandaged fingers can grip it without too much difficulty. It's heavy. Solid. _Real._ He turns it and peers at the words on the plain dark blue cover.

 _The Stranger_

Well. He supposes that's sort of appropriate.

He opens it and flips the pages against his thumb, rustling, watching it all blur past. Streaks and contiguous lines of letters, lost all coherence. No distinct morphology. It's been a long time since he really tried to _read_ anything. Letting his eyes unfocus, transforming words into the sideways sheeting of a hurricane wind. Getting as much out of them that way as he would any other way; he's never felt that words were his friends. Barely even uneasy allies. Usually they just got in the way, put up barriers for him to stumble over. Now they tear out of him like baby wasps from a spider's belly, eager to sting, and he can't keep them in or call them back no matter what he does.

And it makes him so tired.

Rustle falls silent. He looks down, sees he's stopped, sees the words in a solid block of a paragraph that slides over his vision. He doesn't mean to read them but he does, does in slow, halting steps forward, tripping over syllables and phonemes, vowels and consonants. Halfway through he realizes that he's moving his mouth as he progresses through each sentence, forming them with his lips and tongue so he can grip them and hold on, and his stomach coils viciously into his chest and then into his throat.

It didn't just make him crazy, that bullet. It didn't just make him crazy and sick and broken.

It made him stupid.

He finishes the fucking paragraph and sits there staring blankly at the sun on the distant wall. His cigarette long since slipped from his fingers and he's vaguely aware of it smoldering on the flagstones, slender wisp of smoke rising into the air.

 _It was as if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate._

He used to like reading. Used to read more than most people would probably guess. Felt like a secret. Wasn't sure why he thought he had to keep it one.

Used to.

He has his lighter. He could toss the thing onto the flagstones and set it on fire. Would be good use of it. Better use than what he just did. Those words cackling in his fucking face, dancing through his head - too fast for him now. Too quick to follow with his clumsy brain staggering along on two broken legs. The hell did he ever think he was doing, anyway? What was any of it for, that time he spent alone with the words who never liked him? What did he think he was getting out of it? What was the fucking _point?_

If he's stupid now, he only lost something he was never supposed to have in the first place.

 _It was as if the blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope._

Or he could just throw it. Throw it as far as he can, hurl it at the wall, and go the fuck back inside, where he doesn't belong but at least belongs more than out here.

 _Daryl?_

Jerks. Voice he doesn't know. Not cringing backward, but coiling as his gaze flings itself up to the shape standing there on the flagstones - standing _over_ him. Doesn't like that at _all._ He doesn't scramble, display of weakness, and fuck that noise, so instead he _solidifies_ \- feet planted flat on the steps, elbows on his knees, shoulders wide and thrown back. He can make himself appear bigger than he is. Shadows help and the sun is bright, but he'll do what he can with what he has.

Knows what he looks like. He refuses to look in the fucking mirror but he knows. Knows he's wild-haired, wild-eyed, too thin. Still nearly gaunt. Perfect combination of dangerous and pathetic.

(He loathes self-awareness. Self-knowledge. He envied each animal as he ripped them open and dragged out their guts, that they died understanding nothing. Even as the bullet destroyed him he understood what was happening to him, and he understands it now, and he'll die in that understanding.)

Anyway. He has company.

Voice is low, smooth. Pleasant, and therefore unpleasant. _Friendly,_ he guesses. Knows his name. Doesn't like that either, because how? What else does this asshole know? Asshole repeats it, upward inflection, tense line of concern just audible beneath - deceptive lightness.

Nothing has exactly happened yet, but he would be quite happy to kill this man.

But no. Knows him, actually. Takes a few seconds of rummaging but he gets it: With Rick, that first day. The walkers, dragging them off. Hacking them up, spongy flesh and reeking blood everywhere. Wide eyes. Yes, thank you, he came along just in time, and with Rick there was someone else and that someone else was talking. Irritating. He regarded it then as a distraction. Rick was all that mattered. Because _she_ was all that mattered.

Knows him. He doesn't move, wary, but doesn't think killing is the best default action here. Man is talking again: Maybe he won't be remembered. A lot was going on that day. But Aaron remembers _him_ , because you don't forget someone who saves your life, and right - _Aaron._ Name, somewhere. He had it. It just wasn't important enough to file.

If he had any files anymore. If he had anything other than this mound of loose bloody paper.

What the fuck is Aaron _doing_ here?

Came to see him.

Oh, great. Fucking fantastic, well, here he is, Aaron's seen him, Aaron has established his existence, so can Aaron please remove himself from the fucking premises now before he assists Aaron in consuming his own testicles?

Short and clipped and casually vicious. He can see the man's face now, even in the shade - features pleasant like his voice, open and calm - and watches narrowed-eyed for a flicker. Shock, pain. Any indication that his words have done their stinging.

Maybe he catches a tiny bit of something. Maybe. Otherwise that placid face remains placid. Should be infuriating, should make him want to try hurting of a more visceral kind, but it isn't and it doesn't.

He's just tired again.

Look, if this is a bad time Aaron can come back. He gets it. He's sure it hasn't been an easy transition. Never is in the best of circumstances. But he wanted to stop by and say hello, say thanks, and also there's something to show him.

Blinks, wondering if that last part was actually there. Heard right. Words failing him here too. Show him? He just suggested he might like to castrate this man and feed him the leftovers, and this man has something to _show him?_

Yeah. At his place. It's not far. Next street over. He saw it, walking that night with Rick. Little smile, and the thing is that there's nothing forced about that smile. There's nothing fake or affected. That or Aaron is an extraordinarily good actor. Little smile, as if he didn't even hear the thing about being made to eat his own balls. Or it was clearly a joke and he doesn't take it seriously.

Won't take long. It's not a big deal or anything. Just might be something he'd like to see is all.

He is having no success whatsoever imagining anything he might _like_ to see. Nothing. Not even _her_ in all her awful divinity _,_ because now he can bear to look directly at her radiance without going blind, without burning away, but it still hurts so much and it still scares the shit out of him and it is by no means something he would ever say he _likes._

If he really doesn't want to, that's fine. Aaron rolls a shoulder. Really seems like as far as he's concerned, it might truly be fine. If he doesn't want to, it's not a big deal. It's not going anywhere.

Yesterday his body took him to the Baby and it did so against his will, rendering him a terrified passenger inside himself in a way he never imagined he would become. Now his body is closing the book and pushing itself up to stand, and he realizes with numb horror that he's _nodding_ , muttering something about letting Carol know, turning to go back inside the house. Shoes, also. He should have those.

Shoes so he can accompany this stranger to his house and be showed something unknown. Shoes so he can leave this space, where he has _sort_ of a grip _some_ of the time and isn't _always_ hazardously out of control, and go into another space where none of those things are true anymore.

By himself.

He's fucking suicidal.

At least that much isn't new.

* * *

 **Note:** I've noticed that in my more ambitious/pretentious stuff - with the exception of Howl - I eventually include some kind of book that I feel works as kind of a thematic anchorpoint, or a reflection of what's going on with someone psychologically. I didn't know Camus' The Stranger would be it for this one, but I think it works pretty well.


	17. back then I couldn't do the things

**Chapter 17: back then I couldn't do the things that I can do now**

 _So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation._ \- Richard Siken

He doesn't have any idea what the fuck he's looking at.

(Except he suspects that may not actually be true. He suspects perhaps he does know. That the knowledge in question is lost, not in the wreckage of his files but the ruins of other parts of his memories, a palace of an archive - images and sounds, smells, tastes, every message ever delivered by the network of nerves laced under his skin. Once his memory was as sharp as his bolts and it flew as far and hit the mark almost every time. Once he retained everything he experienced, even if he didn't always know it. Even if by necessity he became skilled at hiding the worst parts from himself. Not selectively erasing but taking certain things and tucking them away down long dusty hallways, cramped and full of cobwebs. Closets he never had any reason to go into. Cellars and attics. He kept everything but there were always things he hid from himself. But that doesn't matter now, because the bullet tore open his files and scattered them everywhere, and it also crashed through supporting pillars and beams and load-bearing walls, and entire sections collapsed into rubble. Everything is there, but buried under hopelessly large mounds of debris. In time he might dig some of them out. But many others are lost to him forever.)

(But sometimes it doesn't take much digging at all.)

He doesn't have any idea what the fuck he's looking at, except it might be sort of familiar. The familiarity irritates him. A lot of shit here irritates him, including Aaron, and he looks over his shoulder and throws a glare like a rock, blinking in the sun that slams in particle-laden waves onto the driveway outside the garage.

Aaron is standing just inside the doorway, arms crossed, still with that infuriatingly placid expression. Refuses to be shaken by him. Not sure what else to do short of launching himself at this asshole and trying to twist his head off his body.

No. He won't. Thinks it wearily: If he was going to do any head-twisting he probably would have already made the attempt. He's simply irritated, and he's avoided major headaches for a longer period than normal but yes, here it is - thunder far in the distance and flashes of lightning on the horizon. So that's not helping. And worst is that this is his own fucking _fault_ because he could have said no and he said yes and he has no idea what the hell he was thinking. No more idea than he has regarding what the fuck is in front of him, scattered all over the interior of the fucking garage, on shelves and a worktable, tools, and a bulky thing under a fucking tarp like a pile of bodies.

He knows what he was thinking. He _wasn't_ thinking. That's the fucking problem.

Except he knows what he was really thinking.

He was thinking he would _try._

He grits his teeth and turns to face Aaron head-on. Lowers his own head a little, like he might be about to charge. Hell, maybe he is after all. The fuck is this? What the fuck did Aaron bring him here for? Particularly loud growl of thunder, though still distant, and he squeezes his eyes briefly closed and very much against his preference his hand raises itself to his temple.

It's directly behind his left eye.

Those are always the worst.

There's a warm displacement of air as Aaron moves forward - sharp displacement, swift movement. Eyes snap open and he lunges backward as Aaron reaches for him, and he's a snarling dog baring his teeth, snapping, hands hooked into claws; he'll rip Aaron the fuck open if he touches him, if he gets _near_ him, rip his throat open and gouge out his eyes and leave them here on the floor of the garage to have his own look at whatever bullshit he dragged him here to see.

He's done it. God, he's done it, before, he _has_. Eyes popping under his thumbs, popping like ripe grapes and pouring thick warm liquid over his knuckles. Blood and clear stuff trickling down to his wrists. He knows the hard resistance of the back of an eye socket. Blunted his nails on it. There was a lot of screaming and then blood in his mouth and strings of flesh between his teeth and there wasn't screaming anymore.

He's breathing very fast.

Standing. Only standing, fists shaking at his sides. He's not killing anyone. He's not. He's not going to.

He's all right. He can be all right.

Aaron's voice, soft. A few feet away with his hand raised and outstretched - not reaching anymore. Raised like he's trying to pacify a frightened animal. It's okay. He's not going to touch. He was just worried. _Looked like you were in pain._

He attempts another glare, but he can feel the weakness at its heart. Yes, he's hurting. He hurts most of the time. Feels an unwelcome flash of pleading, as if Aaron has the power to make this stop. As if he could ask and have that request granted. Pain gone. Like if it's bad enough and he's sufficiently desperate he might ask anyone, lunge from person to person, grip their clothes and drop to his knees and beg them.

 _I just want it to stop._

(Since he woke up in the hospital he has been oddly and ambiently obsessed with the concept of cessation. He has several mostly unexamined suspicions regarding why this is the case. He doesn't want to go there. He knows nothing good is waiting for him.)

Is it his head? There's Tylenol inside. Probably not much good for anything serious, but it's-

No. No. It's. He drags in a breath. He needs to stop this. He needs to stop this part of it himself. Haul himself free from blood and screaming and death, if he can, and put it away and be all right. He might dislike Aaron intensely, but Aaron isn't going to hurt him. He's pretty sure. He's not in danger.

Aaron is.

It's not that bad. He swallows. He has stuff for it back at home. At…

 _Home._

No, he's all right.

Is he sure?

Yes. Yes, he's sure. Which is when he realizes that he's as good as said he doesn't want to go back. Because it's unbelievable but he fucking doesn't. Not yet. Turning back to the garage and scanning what's there merely because it gives him something to focus on besides the approaching pain. It's still far away. He has some time.

He _does_ know what this is.

He walks forward, slow. He might not completely trust his legs. But they work okay, and then he's standing in front of the tarp and gripping a fold of it in his trembling hand, tugging it down and off, Aaron mostly forgotten behind him.

Yeah. He knew.

He stares at it.

Rick mentioned he used to have a bike. Very quiet from over his shoulder. Not close, but it's possible that proximity wouldn't mean so much to him at the moment anyway. The rest of the world has faded and he's come unmoored in time, unmoored in everything, staring at the thing that was under the tarp and listening to Aaron talk and trying to figure out how the fuck he feels about anything at all.

Rick mentioned he used to have a bike. Lost it. And this was here when Aaron took the house - guy before him must have been working on it - and he has no idea what the hell to do with it, bikes aren't at all his thing, but now it seems like maybe someone might get something out of it, so he thought-

He turns. No.

 _Stop_.

Aaron stops, looking at him with his mouth half open. Closes it. Must have seen something that told him it was probably a good idea to do so. And there's no anger, is the thing. Might be that he raged it all out of himself a few minutes ago, might be the throb gradually working itself into being between his temples, or it might be something else, but he's not angry. He's irritated, like he was, but he's also very tired, and he's sick of this stale shit and he just wants it to stop.

So yes. Stop it. Stop bullshitting him. Rick didn't _happen to mention_ this. This wasn't some casual conversation that Rick and Aaron were having, and the subject of his poor brain-damaged houseguest came up and he just _happened_ to mention bikes. That is not how it went. Could be the bullet made him stupid in some ways, sure, but like he told _her_ in her room, he can still add two and two and get four.

Rick told Aaron to do this. _Told_ him. Just fucking admit it. His voice is weary, comes out a little cracked, and he turns back to the skeleton of the bike. This is Rick's ludicrous idea of _therapy_ and once again he's basically been tricked into it, and he's so fucking sick of it. He's sick of being treated like a damn child. Admit it. Admit that's what's going on here.

Admit it and then let him go back to that place, that _house,_ which is absolutely no kind of home. So he can take some pills and curl up and try to sleep through the storm in his head.

Aaron looks at him. Even without facing him, that gaze is palpable. Can see it in the corner of his eye. Also feel it, the weight. Tangibility. There's warmth, of living and being in the world. This man is not stupid either. Not by any means. Thinking now, thinking what to say, and fine; let him think. It's not like it matters.

He's looking at something of his own. Skeleton of the thing. No muscles, no tendons and ligaments, no skin. Nothing to make it run. Nothing to make it move. Bones can't move on their own. They merely lie there and gather the dust.

Something needs to come along and pick them up. Put them together so they can.

Okay. Even quieter. Okay. Yes. Rick told him. Or didn't _tell_ him; Rick talked to Aaron about it and asked if Aaron could help, and this is what they came up with together. Yes, it might be fair to call this therapy. Yes, Aaron should have been straight with him from the beginning. He apologizes for that.

Look, here's the thing. Closer. Maybe a couple of feet away, visible through a ragged curtain of hair. Here's the thing: _You can do whatever you want. You can do something with this, you can walk away now and never come back, you can walk away now and come back later if you feel like it. And I'm not a therapist or anything, and it's perfectly all right if you don't like me, but believe it or not, I do know a little about what it's like to be somewhere you don't feel like you belong. Where other people don't feel like you do either._

 _Not like you. I've never been shot in the head. But still._

 _If you want this,_ gesturing to the bike, to the shelves of parts and the worktable and the tools, _it's here for you. I'm sure as hell not going to do anything with it._

 _Like I said. Someone else might as well._

Long moment of nothing. His hands are loose at his sides again, tremble remaining. Whisper of gauze on gauze. And he looks down at his bandaged fingers and back at the possibility of a bike that moves, that _runs_ and roars and chews up the road and calls the wind and opens up the world like a box of music, and up and back at Aaron, and he doesn't want to feel like this, this pulling toward something new, and he has no idea how to make it stop.

Isn't actually sure he _does_ want to.

He won't be able to work on the damn thing with his hands all bandaged up like this. That might be a problem.

Well.

He sighs. Stares down at his scuffed boots for a while. Looks at Aaron, and he tells himself that it's not like giving in. It's not like caving to pressure. It really isn't like that at all.

Okay. Yeah. All right. More sigh.

He'll take that Tylenol, if it's still on offer.

Aaron smiles. The urge to punch it off his face does not come.

Much.

* * *

He's sitting on the porch. The steps. Front porch, now.

That's something.

His head is down, face hidden. Something is in his hands. A cigarette is dangling from the corner of his mouth, and as she comes up the walk she wonders in an idle kind of way if there's any danger, with his head held like that and his hair in his face, of setting himself on fire.

How much he would mind.

No. That's horrible. He would mind a lot. One thing he _does_ seem to hate and want to avoid - aside from what he's doing to his own skin - is pain, and that's something as well.

She glances down as she passes the spot where the squirrel was. The ants are there, building their little mound of a nest. The squirrel is gone. Not even bones. Not even the grass pressed down or stained to mark where it was.

She raises her eyes and he's looking at her, cigarette rolling between his lips, and as she comes closer he lifts a hand and plucks it free, exhales a stream of smoke through his nose. He never smoked a huge amount when he was at the prison, when cigarettes could be had; he clearly enjoyed it but it never seemed like a chemical dependence thing. It actually would have surprised her if Daryl was ever chemically dependent on anything at all. It just didn't seem like how he was. Didn't seem like part of his makeup.

Now she gets the sense he smokes a lot, but she still doesn't think it's the nicotine.

The twitching in his fingers. Especially if he's not biting them. Something to do with them, to scratch that visceral itch.

Except they aren't bandaged now, and when she notices that her gut tightens in a way that twists into real pain, and she nearly has to halt in her tracks.

She reaches him, stops in front of him. His head is tipped slightly back so he can look up at her. The sun is setting, and while so much of the time he's been too pale, now his face is cast in a deep ruddy gold. The sheen on his tangle of black hair looks like gilding.

He blinks slowly, once. Takes another drag. And that's when she sees that he's sharper in the eyes than he's yet been - not in the sense of anger but in _presence._ He's alert, and it's not jittery fear. He's calm, features smoothed out, and he's studying her with a minimum of confusion and little of the tension she saw when he was with her yesterday.

There's grease on his hands, packed under his ragged nails. Gathered in the edges of his scabs and the chewed parts of his cuticles. She looks at it for a long moment, and completely without comment he allows her to look. He's doing some looking of his own, and she doesn't find herself minding, because she can't detect any of what sent ice down her spine before. Looking at her like she's _his._

Vaguely like he might to eat her alive, just to keep her with him.

He's holding a book.

It's small. Slim. She can't make out the title. She's not certain it matters, because the most salient fact is that he's holding a _book_ and he appears the way he does, and she _has_ seen this since he came through the gates. She saw it the night he came to her room, just before he crumpled into her arms, when he told her he saw her in the grip of her nightmare and he asked her if she was okay. And it was his ghost, the ghost of the man she left in the funeral home, the ghost lost inside this broken shell that's carried it all the way from Atlanta. Carried it to her.

Gazing at her now out of those dark eyes.

"Hi," she whispers.

He gives her a nod. Says nothing. He might be _here_ with her but he's employed his strange new ability to obscure himself and she can't tell with any certainty what he's feeling.

His hair has fallen away from his face and she can see the little scar on his brow. Edge of it crusted with old blood. He picked it open again. Digging into it.

And again she thinks it's almost as though he's trying to find something. Drag it out of himself. Not the bullet, but maybe something the bullet left behind.

"Can I sit?"

He inclines his head to his right, and remains silent - which she doesn't suspect she can or even should do anything about. So she sits down next to him and and wraps her arms loosely around her knees, and peers at the book open in his hand. She could read some of it if she leaned closer - the title or author at the top of the page - but she doesn't suspect that's such a great idea either. Not until she knows where he is at the moment regarding his personal space and how much of it he wants to keep clear, which seems to be in constant shift. She can't assume anything.

"Whatcha readin'?"

He glances at her, hesitates a few seconds, then wordlessly hands the book over. She takes it and looks down at the page, scanning the lines; it's not a book she recognizes, though the name of the author is ringing an extremely faint bell. School. Somehow she associates it with school. Seen on a shelf or mentioned in a class where she had only been paying half her attention.

 _Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living._

She pulls in a breath, hands it back. He closes it, looks down at it as if he half expects it to do something.

She not certain she likes it. Not at all.

"It's hard," he says, and though his voice is very quiet, she starts. All this silence and now he talks, and not with any apparent cause.

But then he goes on.

"It's hard to read it. Harder than it… than it used to be." He swallows, and now there's an intense pointedness in the way he's not meeting her eyes.

"Like… Like it's hard to understand it?"

"Like I forgot how." Flat now as well as quiet. He's not pleased about this. He's not pleased and she's pretty sure he doesn't want to be telling her. But he is, and he's reading, and it washes over her with abrupt heaviness, that he's trying _._ Doesn't trust himself with his own knife, threatened to break a baby's neck, but he's fucking _trying_. "Had a headache, earlier. Doesn't help."

She wants to touch his arm. Wants to so much. Touch his bare, mutilated hand, feel the persistent life humming inside him beneath the skin gnawed open and raw. Something. _Anything._ That fierce need to connect that slammed her into him that night by the fire and all the times after, made her aggressive. Made her _furious._

 _We should_ do _something._

"Are you alright now?"

"I'm never alright." Looking at her, finally, or at least his head partially turned toward her, mouth drawn tight but still no anger. He's tired, that much is obvious, but it's not crushing weariness. It's not despair. He takes another deep drag. "Not really. You know that."

"Yeah," she says softly. "I do."

"It's gone, though." He tips his head up, gazing at a blue sky deepening to indigo, a few faint stars scattered across it like flecks of glitter on fabric. The remaining light falls across him in such a way that it smooths him out even more, and he's still far too thin, cheeks still hollow and eyes sunken, but the light is catching those sunken eyes and sharply ridged cheekbones and lingering there, his lips slightly parted as if he's working through the possibility of saying something, and she thinks _he's beautiful._

Strange thing to think. But she won't take it back.

He is.

"If I could fix one thing," he murmurs. "Just one thing. Seein' the world on fire ain't even as bad."

She fights back a shiver. He said something about fire, that night with her. Fire and Hell. Tough to forget. "You see the world on fire?"

He turns his face to her, though he doesn't lower it. It's strange and a bit unsettling, a distinctly unnatural angle. A way a neck shouldn't align itself. "World _is_ on fire, Beth." He raises his cigarette to his lips and inhales. Ash falls like snow. "There's things in the dark. Y'all don't see 'em 'cause you don't want to. But I do."

She can't fight it after all. She does shiver. And it's not _him._ It's not the thought of how horrible it must be to live in that mind and see terrible things that aren't there.

It's that he sounds absolutely convincing.

"What's on your hands?" Not that she's purposefully trying to steer the subject to less morbid territory. Simply that she has no idea where to take that line of conversation. If there _is_ anywhere to go with it. If there is anything she could possibly say. And anyway, she wants to know.

"Grease." Self-evident. He finally lowers his head and examines the glowing end of the cigarette. "You know Aaron?"

She does. She nods. "Not real well." Pause; she remains uncertain regarding how much of this to tell him, their own journey north. How it went. What it was like. The world after him, the world they clawed together from shreds and scraps, making their trudging way into a life without Daryl Dixon. The process of leaving him behind, doing so with every mile. Every step.

But sooner or later she's going to have to tell him about it. Or someone else will. And the longer they wait, the more irritated he's likely to be. At _best._

"He found us. After the van broke down and we had to walk. We were… dyin', basically. There was a drought and we ran outta water. He was watchin' us, seein' if we were safe to bring in. He decided we were. So." She rolls a shoulder. "Here we are. He's a pretty good guy."

"You think so?"

"Yeah. I do."

"Has a bike," he says. Mutters. "In pieces." And he doesn't say any more, but she doesn't need him to. It's piercingly obvious. Rick said they were going to _try something,_ and it's not a difficult conclusion to arrive at.

That bike, at the prison. He had it since the farm. Then, traveling in that pathetic little convoy, it had been solely about transportation, but later, when things were better… Watching him working on it on a warm summer day, sweating and up to his elbows in grease, not even that it always _needed_ any real maintenance but simply because he was clearly happy to be doing something with his hands that wasn't fighting or killing or even hunting. Something for the pleasure of itself.

Happy. He was, then. He was happy and it didn't take very much to make him so. He was never complicated in that way.

"You gonna put it together?"

He shrugs. Tosses the cigarette on the pavement and extends a leg, crushes it out with his heel. And that appears to be all he has to say on the topic.

But it's yet another something.

There's also this. It wouldn't be a stupid idea to not attempt it. Wouldn't be a stupid idea to think it's very possible that he's tried enough for one day and let him be, merely sit with him here until he wants her to go. But it's also possible that she's tired of walking away, tired of letting things alone, and she doesn't intend to do it now. Not when she's made Rick a promise. Not when she wants what, deep down, she desperately wants.

Not when she knows that this is a move she can make and it's not _im_ possible that it won't blow up in her face.

She angles her body more toward him, pushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear and draws a firm breath. This is nothing. Easy. Once not long ago it was something she would have done without hesitation, and even if that was another life and might as well be eons in the past, she might be able to trick herself into thinking otherwise.

"You wanna go for a walk with me?"

He looks at her. Gives her another slow blink. The ever-present confusion in him has swelled, quickened, and he cocks his head in that discomfiting animal way as if he's listening to something in a pitch she can't hear. "What?"

"A walk," she repeats patiently. "With me. You wanna?"

She's not certain what she's expecting him to say. Not even completely certain what she wants to hear. Talking to him isn't a disaster so far, but she has every reason to believe that when it comes to him, things can still go very bad very fast, without much in the way of warning and almost no chance to defuse. Walking with him, well out of whatever poor excuse for a comfort zone he has… And all the reasons in the world for him to say no. Balk. Maybe get upset with her for suggesting it.

Instead he rolls a shoulder, turns the book over in his hand and sets it aside. Rubs at his chin, adding to some of the grease already smeared there and clumping the scruff. He isn't upset; he merely looks thoughtful. Not fearful. Not balking. Not gearing up to say no.

 _Oh my God._ She didn't really think.

Didn't have faith.

"Yeah." He shrugs again. He doesn't appear _comfortable,_ not in the least, but the discomfort also isn't overwhelming him. Nothing is. "Alright."

* * *

He's silent. That's okay.

Up the block and around and down again. Looks from a couple of people passing, but not really that overt, though she knows he notices. He says nothing, gives her no indication that he did; she just _knows,_ because there isn't a lot that escapes him and other people are something he almost certainly pays the most attention to. Has to. It's probably one of the things that kept him alive.

She knows he's made semi-coherent allusions to running into people out there on the road. It's all very unclear, but going by what he's said, those encounters didn't end well. Not for those people, anyway. And he hasn't specified as much, but she gathers that it was his sheer savagery that gave him the edge. The shock of a human being attacking you with their nails and their teeth as much as with a weapon.

People know how to handle a man with a weapon coming at them. People know how to handle a walker. Not so much something perfectly between the two, and faster and more vicious than both.

 _Don't forget that. Don't forget what he is._

 _What he's had to become._

But at the moment he's walking silently beside her, his head slightly down and his hands loose at his sides - though she doesn't miss the twitching in his fingers. Always the twitching. Like he needs to grab and grip something. Hold on. Other than that there's an essential stillness in his movements that makes her wonder if that was part of how he traveled - keeping off the road entirely but parallel to it, sticking to the shadows wherever he could, and moving in such a way that he hardly stirred them or the air or the leaves under his feet. When he first got here she noticed that he seems to cloak himself in shadows, and maybe it was out there that he got to know them well enough to command them.

That's ridiculous.

But it doesn't really feel that way.

It's a clear night. The moon is rising. He keeps glancing up at it, low and pale gold over the rooftops, and more than once she's positive she catches his lips moving. As if in voiceless conversation with someone or someones unseen.

It's okay that he isn't talking - at least not to _her_ \- but all at once the silence between them is a little too much, and she squares her shoulders and takes a breath.

"You okay?"

"I like the moon," he says softly, and she might think that he hadn't heard her except for how she knows he did. He's purposefully ignoring the question, and she doesn't blame him. It was a stupid question. If anything he's being a perverse kind of polite by pretending she didn't ask it. "Used to walk under it."

"When you were comin' from Atlanta?"

He nods. "The sun was too bright. Hurt." A quick grimace. "Couldn't always keep out of it, but."

His headaches. Whatever else is physically wrong with how the contents of his skull function, she has absolutely no way of even making an educated guess at this, but she'd be comfortable betting the current equivalent of cash that his dislike of bright light is part of it. Or possibly it was acquired. Possibly a result of simply avoiding it for long enough.

Maybe both.

He's a nocturnal animal now. He doesn't belong in the sunlight.

"You walked at night?" Which of course she knows, but he hasn't explicitly said, and she wants to keep him talking.

Another nod. "Usually. It's better. People don't see you. You see them. Campfires." He smiles, and it's thin and grim and she hates it, but it's only there for a fraction of a second. If she had blinked at the wrong moment she might have missed it. "They don't see you till you want 'em to."

"How many of them saw you?"

She doesn't mean to ask it. She hears it come out of her mouth as if it belongs to someone else, and there's a few seconds of blankness followed by a horrible internal scramble to somehow claw it back into herself. She doesn't want to know, and she doesn't want to make him think about it any more than he is already. She doesn't want to send him there. She has him and so far this evening she hasn't felt any danger of losing him, but that cold deadness _is_ in him somewhere, and that cold deadness is what walked under the moon with firelight burning in its eyes.

He's looking at her now. His face is thrown completely into those shadows that have become his allies, and she can't make out his eyes. His mouth. Anything that might tell her who she's staring back at.

And he looks away. After a couple of minutes of silence she realizes that he isn't going to answer.

She should feel better about that than she does.

It's not full dark yet. But suddenly it seems darker, the houses around them weirdly unreal and the lights inside dim, and even the walls themselves don't appear entirely solid, a membrane, as if something might force its way through if it pushed hard enough. Like she can almost see through to the wreckage outside. And like the trees out there are closing in, crowding, the representatives of something harsh and hungry and very old - something coming to reclaim this space they've set aside for a parody of how life used to be.

This space where they don't belong. Not anymore.

But where he might.

So where does that leave her?

* * *

They stop in the center of the street, directly between the two houses, and she faces him, intending to offer some sort of _goodnight_ \- and can't say anything.

This is the first time since they started walking that she's looking directly at him, seen the entirety of his face - or as much of it as she can right now - and he's gazing at her with an expression that's neither fearful nor dead nor the dark possessiveness she's seen, nor even the ghostly calm from the porch steps. But she _has_ seen it. She knows it, and it scoops her breath out of her lungs.

She saw it the morning he was with her. Sitting on her bed and staring at her with something like wonder.

"I was thinkin' about you," he murmurs, and it's like a warm hand on the back of her neck - startles her and her shoulders twitch but she doesn't want to shrug it away. The weight of him. How she can tell he's still _here._

"When I was walkin'," he continues, as if clarifying in response to a request she didn't issue. "Thought about you. Thought about you a lot." He takes a slow breath, and the whimsical thought comes to her that he might be taking the one he scooped out of her. "Wasn't always a moon, but when there was you…"

He trails off and looks away. Through his hair, the moonlight is pouring into his unblinking eyes.

"Daryl-"

"It wasn't your fault."

Back at her. Sharp but not hard. He's boring into her, drilling past everything she's put up and held there for months, and she can't keep him out. Doesn't want to. He fell asleep in her arms and since then she hasn't been able to rid herself of the sense that it was a long time coming. That he was where he was always meant to be.

Which is another ridiculous thing. But no part of this isn't. No part of this isn't utterly absurd.

"It wasn't." He gives her a single shake of his head. "You didn't pull the fuckin' trigger. It was a stupid accident. It wasn't your fault."

 _No._ "You were tryin' to save me. I was the one with the goddamn scissors." Choked. She cried with Rick and she's cried for him alone and she's cried with him there, tears streaming down her face when he called her a _bitch_ and a _stupid little cunt_ and as good as told her it _was_ all her fault, every bit of it, every second of his endless suffering.

Then crying when she sat on the back porch with him. _I missed you._ And he touched her.

 _Don't._

He shrugs. "Maybe. Don't matter. It happened. Can't undo it. Can't go back." A smile flickers into being and it's awful, it's pained and broken and far more like a grimace, but there's no anger in it and there's also no bitterness. It's _sweet_ in the worst possible way, and she can barely stand to look at it. "You can't help me. No one can. But it wasn't your fault."

She _can't_ look at it. Can't look at him. She squeezes her eyes shut and ducks her head, fights the urge to bury her face in her hands, because she doesn't want him to see this either. She has no idea why; this is something else that shouldn't matter. He's already seen her like this. It's nothing new and she no longer thinks it's something likely to upset him. He doesn't like it when she cries, she's certain that's still true, but in another way he also completely accepts it, because for him pain is now part of the most basic fabric of existence, and if someone besides him is feeling it, that's simply to be expected.

A knot is sealing off her throat. She can't speak. She can hardly breathe. And he just keeps going, relentless.

"You can't bring me back, Beth. I don't get to come back. I was out there too long." His fingertips on her cheek, so gentle, and she almost screams. "But thanks for tryin'."

His touch vanishes like the smoke from his cigarette. She opens her eyes and blinks the blur away in time to see him stepping away from her, moving back in the near dark - and lifting his hand to gnaw at his thumb. She can tell that he's biting hard. Tearing slowly at his skin. He may not even know he's doing it.

"G'night."

He's gone.

The worst thing, she thinks as she walks numbly to her side of the street and up to her door, is that yes, she can believe that he's right. He might know himself better than anyone. Might not have faith, might want to _get better_ and not truly believe that he can even as he tries, and it might not be pessimism. It might just be accurate.

She can believe that he's right.

But she can't stop trying either.


	18. the blood has stopped pumping

**Chapter 18: the blood has stopped pumping and he's left to decay**

 _The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths. I take them back. Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the_ _ _floorboards.__ _Crossed out._ \- Richard Siken

This is how it was supposed to be.

In the dark after. Resting, all weight lifted. He curls on his side - so soft, _comfiest bed he's had in years,_ and even the candles are extinguished. Even the sun. Not even the moon shines. He's alone like this, the lid pulled closed, safe from the creatures hissing and groaning outside. They burst through the traps, the door. They trampled the fences. This is the only place of sure protection, and in here he's not afraid. The darkness is kind and it enfolds him. Embraces, warm and thick. The shadows cloak him; he knows them. Walked with them. They protected him too, in their way, until he had to emerge from them to make a kill, cook the meat, eat it and put out the fire and melt into them again.

They always took him back, like patient lovers.

He never had one before. A lover. Never wanted. Never felt like he was poorer for it. If he had a family, that was the only necessary company. He could keep himself warm at night. If he needed any kind of release, there was his own hand. Never even did that very much. Most of the time it didn't occur to him. Simply didn't cross his radar. His dick was something to piss through and nothing more.

Oh, but then she _sang._ She sang like that and she was generous enough to let him watch, listen, and she changed everything.

No. He can't think about her like that. That's tantamount to blasphemy. He's a diseased piece of filth and it's an insult for him to so much as touch her. Can't believe he ever dared. Can't believe she allowed it, doesn't know what she was thinking. Even her divine generosity surely wouldn't extend that far.

 _She's a teasing little whore and she'll get what's coming to her._

He could pour acid into his own ear. That's an option. Eat through, bubble his steaming brain out through his nose and mouth. That would probably make it stop, these things it shits out and grips him by the jaw and hair and forces him to look at.

Probably.

Though if he's really in Hell he's not sure how effective that would actually be.

 _And we'll be good_ no, we will be nothing of the fucking kind ever again if we ever were at all which is highly unlikely.

But he's safe now, isn't he? In the dark, in the quiet, sealed. His own mind can't get to him here, can't violate itself that way anymore. He's safe and in here he _can_ be good, because he's not alone after all. Because _she's_ here too, climbed in with him and laid herself down beside him, pulled the lid shut after her. And all the fear bled out of her just like it bled out of him, and they don't have to pretend now.

No one is going to see this.

She's warm. So is he. Pressing closer to her, all along her side; yes, she's very warm, very warm and very still and silent - no more singing, she doesn't need to - and there's room enough to raise himself on an elbow and lean over her, and even if he can't see her like this, he can touch her. He can touch her and she won't stop him and it's not wrong, because they're the same, him and her, and she would know that.

She would understand, wouldn't she?

She does.

It's not wrong, as the dead swarm over their bed like ants, for him to trail his fingertips downward, lift loose strands of her hair away from her face and comb them into place, smooth them out. Find the tiny hole in her brow and circle it - it was supposed to be her and now it is, her too, she's like him - and smear the blood around the outer curve of her eye socket. Kissing her closed eyelids, not even moving in dreams. Her cool cheek. Her jaw.

Her mouth.

Parted lips and soft, lingering warmth here too, and she's wet inside and he can taste her - just a little. He won't be greedy. She's so sweet. And she has no breath for him to take but he has none to give so that's fine. That's fair. Hand pausing on her throat to exult in the exquisite delicacy of her bones, her muscles and tendons, then sliding on down to rest over her sleeping heart.

She's not a fairy tale princess. None of this is going to wake her, his gentle attention won't disturb her, and he's going to be so careful. This is a very careful business. He's never done this before and it's important to do it right. No wrong steps and no false moves, his lips and his hands. All of him, inside all of her. Everything.

Everything in its right place. Everything where it belongs.

He loves her so much, but he was never good with words and he's even worse now. Never could tell her. Never knew how to make it work even when his brain was all there, all his. Until she took it away, but now he can take something back, and it's all right. Her mouth was wet. He knows she's wet all through, open and ready, the last of her warmth waiting there for him.

He loves her so much.

And he's going to show her.

* * *

She lies there for a long time after she wrenches her hand out from between her legs. She lies there and she stares at the ceiling with tearless eyes, and she wonders just how sick she is, and how sick she's going to be.

She didn't finish. She didn't even rise very far. But she rose a little way.

He carried her.

* * *

He lies there for a long time after his eyes flutter open, waiting for his breathing to slow. He lies there and he stares at the moon-soaked room, feels the blood thundering hot through his veins, and he wonders just what it is that he brought with him out of six hundred miles of shadows, crawling hungry through the dark.

He wonders how much of it was inside him already.

* * *

Denise.

No longer a surprise. He feels a significant degree of resignation. Today isn't good so far, started bad, and he has no idea why; it's just _shit,_ feels like shit, dark things roiling sickeningly in the recesses of his brain, echoes of things he can't quite remember. Carol calls him gently into the living room and he already knows what he's going to find there: mousy chubby little bitch huddled on one of the chairs, and he sinks down onto the couch and refuses to look at her, and figures he can get through this. Whatever it is. Give her whatever she's wanting to get out of him and make her go away.

It really isn't like she can fix him. He wishes people would stop trying. He gets the sense that it's only upsetting them, their persistent failure, and he would like to live what remains of his life without being someone's fucking project. Someone's fixer-upper.

He wants to get better. Still does. Might actually be possible - vanishingly unlikely but he can't discount it. Might even be willing to try himself. But they could all try less than they have been. Lower some expectations. Everyone might be happier. Even him.

These are good people. Even Rick, compared to him. They're also stupid people and naive people and weak people and unimaginative people, and all those things add up to make them dead people. But the fact remains that they're good people, and he dimly remembers a time when he was willing to die for good people without hesitation. Even the people that used to be his own are slipping into all those categories, and that's distressing.

But _she_ is different. She's not like any of them.

She's more like him than the rest of them can see.

He should gouge his face into bloody strips for daring to think that. Daring anything of the kind.

 _Daryl?_

Yes. Anyway. He gropes for his focus again and finds it, reentering the sunny comfortable room through his eyes and filling it with himself. Flowing over every surface, every texture. He nods but as yet he doesn't have any words he cares to offer her.

She pushes her glasses higher on her nose. How is he doing?

Shrug. Fighting the urge to snap at her because she knows perfectly well how he's doing. No way she would have walked in here without being _briefed._ He's doing alright, he guesses. No catastrophes to report.

Does he have any good things to report? Is there anything recent that made him feel any better? About anything?

This is a fucking trap. She's poking at very specific points she already knows are there, trying to draw them out of him like lancing a boil. He narrows his eyes at her, leans forward. Gritted teeth, ready to bite. Thinks she's so smooth, so clever. Thinks he doesn't see exactly what she's doing like she lit it up in a neon diagram.

Thinks he's stupid, maybe. Blind. Thinks she can play him, the tricky bitch. His fists are clenching, jagged nails cutting into his palms. Manipulative _cunt,_ he never asked for her to be here, never wanted that, and for fuck's _sake,_ why can't they leave him be? If he has any chance of making this work, why can't they let him work it out on his own? Fucking bikes and walks and cigarettes and conversations and fucking _babies_. Like they know what's best for him. Like they know him at all.

They don't. If they did they would run screaming. If they did they would put another bullet in his head and make it stick this time.

Is he all right?

He's panting. Shaking. Is he all right? His face is red as a sunburn. He drops his head, rakes his hands into his hair and tangles his fingers in it and yanks until his eyes water and goosebumps stab upward from his skin. Ripple, like insects trying to burrow their way out.

Yes. He's all right. He's all right. He closes his eyes and wrestles his breathing into a stuttering but slower rhythm.

He can be all right.

She's quiet for a moment or two. He's grateful to her and hates it. Pathetic. Whipped begging dog. Grateful to her for her silence when she shouldn't be here at all.

Soft: What just happened to him?

He raises his head slightly. Doesn't release his hair. The fuck is she talking about?

Just now. Something happened to him. Happened fast. He was angry, wasn't he? He was very angry. She's being so gentle. She's not afraid in the least. Does he remember what made him angry?

Does it fucking matter? Bares his teeth, just short of snarling, but the fire is lower. The flames aren't licking up the walls of his head. He can see the world unobscured by smoke and snowing ash.

Though behind her, in the corner well out of the sunlight, a naked skeletal scabby thing sits like a dog with its head on one side and its tongue lolling between its grinning razor blade teeth. It's clearly very pleased with him. With his excellent progress.

It might matter.

 _It does matter._

No, it doesn't. Bitch propped up like that, all her withered skin and dead face frozen in a grimace of despair and her pearls and rings and her fine clothes and what the fuck good did any of it do her, _rich bitch,_ hacking her in half and scooping the cash and the jewels into his pack to ride heavy on his shoulders, as useless to him as they were to her. Doesn't fucking matter. Nothing matters.

 _Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future._

He doesn't know what made him angry. Staring down at his hand; he bit through the side of his thumb and he's working a rubbery bit of flesh between his front teeth. Blood is running down his knuckle in a slow seep. Lot of things. _You. Them._ Everything. Everything makes him angry.

He doesn't know. He was just angry.

She shifts in her chair, tilts her head to one side and regards him thoughtfully, and once again he considers the possibility - and the mechanics, force and resistance and inertia and what would be required of his muscles - of smashing her head through the coffee table. Simply as an option that exists. Not one that he's necessarily likely to take.

(He first noticed these tendencies in himself as involuntary fantasies. Images coming to him from nowhere, intrusive, kicking down the door of his conscious mind. Seeing someone - anyone at all - and then seeing them dead, seeing himself making them that way, all the ways in which he could do it and how generally easy it would be. As if he was planning for something, like those plans the government supposedly used to have for attacking every country on Earth. Anticipating some eventuality wherein he would have to murder everyone. It's easy to kill, is the thing. Once you get over the first few times where it spews vomit into your marrow and turns every second of unconsciousness into a stroll through a minefield of horrors, it's not difficult at all.)

(It's not enjoyable. In truth he doesn't enjoy it now, the idea of it or the act in itself. He loathes it and it makes him loathe himself, that this is how he imaginatively engages with other human beings. But he doesn't seem to be able to make it stop.)

(And there is something wretchedly satisfying in the fantasy of the destruction of a human body. Like a turned valve and the hiss of a release of steam.)

Does he know what a seizure is?

He huffs a sharp laugh, gives her a glare into which he tries to pack every atom of contempt he feels for her, and himself and everything. Is she fucking kidding? She think she's sitting in front of a drooling retard with mushy pieces of his brain in his lap? Yeah, he knows what a seizure is.

What would he think if she told him he probably just had one?

Stares at her.

He knows what a seizure is. Knows what it looks like. When he was seven, two houses down from him was a kid with epilepsy, mom waited tables at a roadhouse a good half an hour away and left the kid alone a lot and tended to blow significant portions of her paychecks on crystal meth and didn't get her kid his meds, so while she would be sprawled out high on her beer-stained couch in their cramped trailer living room, skirt rucked up around her thighs from the last dealer who collected on an IOU, this kid would be jerking around outside in the dust with spit running from the corners of his mouth and piss widening a dark spot on his jeans as the other neighborhood kids stood around and watched. Pointed. Laughed, but nervously. Maybe wanted to run like pussies but held their ground.

Tried to hide the shame blooming in their cheeks, ears, backs of their necks. Felt so fucking sick, because it was horrible and there was nothing to do about it. There was no way to help. There was no way to make it stop.

Whispers. He knows what a seizure is. That's not what happened to him.

Not like he probably knows it, no. She leans forward, thick hands clasped between her knees. He stares at them with odd intensity and marvels at what it must be like to have fingers that smooth. Unscarred. But there are parts of his brain that deal with things like anger. Fear. When they're damaged, how he feels those things gets damaged as well. He can have a seizure, in a way. In those parts of his brain.

 _You can get angry and not be able to stop it. You're just angry, really angry, and there isn't always an obvious reason, or maybe there is but you're much angrier than you should be and you don't know why._

Sometimes that happens to people with severe head injuries. It's not uncommon. It's not just him.

So. He shifts his gaze to his own hands. Blood. He thought it was better, yesterday. He wasn't going to come back but for a little while he was doing better. He was trying and he wasn't completely fucking everything up.

So why is today so bad all over again?

This doesn't help. He tightens his fists until a couple more of the scabs crack open, trickle blood. One of the worse bitten places, side of his right middle finger, definitely getting infected and hurts like a motherfucker. Even if the bullshit she's trying to feed him is true, it doesn't help, because all she's fucking telling him is that there's no way to fix it.

Looks up, near snarling again. Unless she has some kind of big fucking plan for making all of this stop.

No, she doesn't have a plan. She's talking to him, calmly, because she thinks maybe they might be able to make a plan together.

He didn't ask for her help.

No. He also isn't telling her to get out.

No, he's not. He isn't. He doesn't. He sits there and stares at nothing. Stares at the thing behind her. Claws like rusty sickles, raised, maggots wriggling out of the holes in its head and tumbling into her hair.

 _Go away._

Who is he talking to?

She's so fucking calm. He hates it. He hates her. He hates the thing standing over her and ready to murder her, he hates himself, he hates himself so fucking much and he hates the sunlight spilling across the floor, every particle that makes up its wave, and he hates this fucking house and this immense lie of a place with its ridiculous walls and he hates that he _made it,_ hates that he woke up in that fucking hospital, hates that he somehow got out of the car, wishes so fucking bad that he could have died on that hallway floor in her arms.

Might not have been so bad. In the end.

He hunches, abruptly weary. Drops his head between his shoulders. No one. He's talking to no one.

Does he see something right now?

 _I don't want to talk about that._

Quiet for a moment. Mockingbird outside, complex trilling song. Lying in whatever dark, secret place he could find in the day, hiding, trying to sleep, listening to the mockingbirds in the trees above. Her. Singing all her unfamiliar songs. Pretty little music box of a girl. Singing to him, curled in the dark, and maybe once his face was wet with tears.

Maybe it was just the rain.

When he was angry just now, what did it feel like?

Looks up. This, he can answer. This, he knows. Cocks his head and looks at her, soft slow bitch, could probably kill her in five or six different ways before she got to the door. Take his time. Make her squeal like a hog. What did it feel like?

 _Do you know what a firestorm is?_

Shakes her head. Not exactly. Like a forest fire?

No. Not forest. Anywhere. Exactly what it sounds like. Fire so big it makes its own wind. Whirlwinds. Tornadoes of fire. Things in its path spontaneously in flame. It's unfuckingstoppable, once it gets that big. It burns the world.

Nuclear bombs. They do that. Hiroshima was flattened, but it also burned.

So it feels like that? Or it did, when he was angry?

Shakes his head. No. It didn't feel like that. That's not what he's saying.

What is he saying?

His blood drips onto the hardwood in a soft patter. Gentle rain. _It doesn't feel like that yet._

Give him some time.

* * *

She doesn't knock. Rick said not to. She had been doubtful, but she figures Rick knows better than almost anyone else would at this point, and she sees the reasoning. That it might actually spook him, if he's already inclined to be spooked. And regardless of how off she's feeling today - for reasons she can't quite recall - she's here, ostensibly, to try to un-spook him.

Because everyone else is at a loss.

 _He's having a bad day. Really bad, whole day._ Rick's mouth tense, lines exacerbated by the shadows of the porch. Shifting from one foot to the other and clearly liking precisely nothing about the fact that he was there. _Denise doesn't know why. Says there may not be any one reason. Can you just… Can you come and sit with him?_

Come and sit with him.

It took her the trip across the street and through the front door to really _get_ what that meant. Because he wasn't on their front porch. And he wasn't in the living room, and she couldn't spot him in the kitchen when they passed it. And Rick wasn't leading her toward the back.

It's a very sunny day, almost disturbingly so, but in here all the shadows are dense and heavy as lead.

Down that short side hall - mirror-familiarity - and stopped in front of a closed door. It's painted a slightly deeper color than hers, more a pale brown than an off-white, but in here no light hits it, and it looks like it could be ten shades darker.

Silence except for their breathing. Judith whimpering somewhere in the house, Carl shushing her. Mockingbird outside. Two. Duet. It's a warm day but the air in here is unnaturally cool, and she thinks about those stupid ghost-hunter TV shows that used to be a thing, seriously excitable people wandering through abandoned houses looking for cold spots that would indicate the presence of an apparition.

There _is_ one present, is the thing. Behind that door is an extremely unquiet ghost.

"I'll be in the kitchen," Rick murmurs. "Yell if you need me."

And for once she doesn't think that translates to _If he tries to kill you, scream as loud as you can._

He leaves her alone.

She stands there for a long moment, in the cool shadows. Then she lays her hand on the knob - cooler brass - and turns it, and opens the door.

It's dim in the hallway. It's dimmer inside the room. The curtains in the window aren't so thick that they block the entirety of the light, but they block a lot of it, and she pauses, blinking, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Trying to make sense of what she can already see.

It's her room. And it's completely not.

The layout is identical. She knows that if the place was totally dark, she could navigate by the placement of walls and the closet, the window. Even the bed is in pretty much the same spot. A dresser - not the same one she has, but guided by what makes spatial sense, it's in basically the same place. Bedside table. There's a lamp. It's missing its shade, the bulb like a shiny pale bald head.

First major difference.

Michonne used to sleep here. Of course she kept it fairly spartan when she did, and when she moved into Rick's room, she took what stuff she had with her. There's no reason to store much here; not really enough to store. There are a couple of boxes piled in a corner, unlabeled. There's a low shelf with some books and folded linens. A couple of towels. She thinks they were probably put here after he took up residence.

Otherwise the place looks like no one occupies it at all. The bed is stripped to the mattress. There are no _personal effects,_ none of the things even the simplest-living people accumulate.

Except a nest of bedding in the far corner, against the wall to the right of the window. Out of the way of the light, but close enough to look out. If he wants to.

Form under the blanket, unmoving. Either unaware of her or uncaring.

But awake. She's spent enough time with him when he's asleep - huddled under shelters, in cars, in the open by risky campfires - to be able to tell. It's almost impossible to pinpoint how she knows; it's not about his breathing, about movement or lack thereof. It's the way he occupies space, the way he displaces air by being in it. The quality of his existence in the world.

She knows him so well. Even now, when she doesn't know him at all. It cramps her breath in her chest, knots her heartbeat around it.

Soft, hoarse, not altogether like her own voice: "Daryl?"

Nothing. Except the quality of his existence shifts again, almost imperceptible, and she knows he heard her.

She also knows he isn't launching himself at her or calling her a _stupid little cunt_ or even growling at her to get out. So she doesn't get out.

She goes in.

She shuts the door behind her, barely notices the _click_ of the latch. Stands, breathes, starts to walk across the room toward him.

It's only then that she truly notices the _smell_ of the place - it doesn't _stink,_ not the way people would conventionally use the word, but it's not at all pleasant. Something else she learned after the world fell apart - but didn't require him to teach her - is that human beings can smell of far more than sweat and decay and blood and smoke and general unwashed body. Sadness has a smell. Grief has a smell. Fear definitely smells - reeks. Sickness, and not just the usual odors that accompany a malfunctioning body.

Madness has a smell. And rage. And loneliness. And she's smelling all of those now, seething together in a cloud which is growing thicker and thicker the closer she gets to him.

 _I don't get to come back. I was out there too long._

But he said he wanted to.

"Daryl," she whispers, and there's no upward inflection. There's no question to be asked here. She knows what she knows and he knows she's less than a couple of feet away from him, and she can put an hour-long conversation's worth of meaning into his name, none of which she would even really be able to put to words anyway. He always struggled with words; the thing is that so does she, since she lost him. As if when he died he took them with him, like an Egyptian pharaoh stocking his tomb with supplies for the afterlife.

He hasn't brought them back to her. They're just gone.

The form under the blanket stirs minutely, only a tangle of dark hair visible above it, and she drops to her knees beside him and remains there, silent, hands clasped between her thighs. Not tense. Now that she's here with him, she's not afraid. There's no anxiety in her, no apprehension. It's not even that she doesn't think he might hurt her; sure, he might. He said he didn't want to, and she believes that implicitly, but he also said he never would, and she knows she can't believe anything of the kind.

Because right now he's doing all kinds of things he doesn't want to do.

"Fuck're you're doin' here?"

Muffled. Very low. Almost inaudible. Flat, too - and not the horrible flatness of one of his dead periods. He sounds exhausted, and it's not the first time she's heard him sound this way.

His eyes in the firelight. Looking into them, knowing she was losing him, like watching someone trying to climb the sheer walls of a pit and flagging. Clinging. Perilously close to falling. Some of it then was a hideously childish kind of sulkiness, some of it was that it was simply easier for him to be numb than to feel, but now she understands that so much of it was also that he was tired. Trying - for her - but so tired.

She doesn't remember very much about the hours she spent in shock, lying on her back and staring up at her bedroom ceiling. But she remembers what it was like after. She remembers that it wasn't like waking up at all - that it didn't feel like returning to herself, or to the world. She remembers that it felt like she had slipped beneath the surface of a cold gray lake and was sinking deeper and deeper, and the pressure was closing in on her, squeezing her lungs and her limbs, and it was more and more difficult to swim. And then she couldn't see the surface at all anymore and there was only the gray.

The knife hadn't been because she was sad. The knife had been because she was tired.

It's a quiet revelation. She's seen him terrified, enraged, utterly despairing, but this is something she hasn't seen, and even if he's hidden himself under a blanket, she knows she's looking at it now, and she stares, clenches her hands into fists that bite her nails into her skin.

 _You can't bring me back._

She's about to say his name again, about to try to answer him, say anything, thrust her hand below the surface of that thick gray water and search for him, and his own hand unfolds from under the edge of the blanket and settles there on the floor palm up, bloodstained fingers softly curled, and her sob chokes into a whimper in her throat.

She's seen that too. His hand, like that. Exactly like that.

"Answer me."

"Rick said I should come." Her voice is shaking a lot less than she was afraid it might. So there's that. "He said you were… He said you were havin' a bad day."

The words sound pathetic in her own ears, wobbling in the air, and the breath that trembles out of him is probably a laugh.

"Daryl-"

" _Bad day?_ He said that?"

So at least he's talking. Even if she can barely hear him at all. "Yeah." She pauses. "I know. Sounds stupid when you say it like that."

"It's stupid no matter how you fuckin' say it." Flat, still, but now there's an edge in it. Something far too thin and far too devoid of energy to be angry. She thinks of spite, and she thinks of pictures of famine victims on the news. Paper skin stretched over bone.

"What happened?"

"Nothin'. Nothin' happened."

His hand lies there, motionless. Might be that hand, on the floor of that hallway, and with a lurch of nausea she does what she did then, reaches down and closes her fingers around it. It's very cold, and though she sees enough of the fresh damage he's done to know that she has to be hurting him, it only twitches slightly and goes limp again.

"I hate my brain," he whispers, and the syllables ricochet off the walls like bullets. "I hate it. I fuckin' hate it, Beth, you got no idea."

She sighs, gazes down. His blood isn't all dry, isn't all congealed, and his fingers are staining hers. Just like they did before. Except he's _not_ gone, not now, even if he feels so far away.

"No. I don't."

"I can't get out." He shudders; she catches it in the dimness, feels it in the air, but it doesn't reach his hand. There's not enough life in him to take it there. "I can't get away. I can't make it stop. If you knew. If you… Fuck, if you could _see._ The _shit_ that's in here."

She doesn't know. But her imagination is good. Always has been. She might be able to get partway there. She abandons the idea that she might hurt him like this, that it might be a problem, and squeezes. Holding on. _Stay here. Stay with me_. "It's not your fault."

He groans - a hollow animal sound - and says nothing else. But that sound really says everything. He'll find a way to _make_ it his fault. Like his fingers. He'll gnaw at himself until he's bleeding, relentless, because some sadistic part of him has decided that he needs to be punished for something, and if he doesn't do it, no one will.

It's his responsibility to torture himself. For the good of whatever.

 _Maybe I coulda done somethin'._

What she did then. What happened after.

"It's _not._ "

She curls her other hand around the blanket and - _fuck it_ \- tugs it down, not quick or sharp but firm, fully expecting him to resist, maybe finally find the strength to smack her hand away. But he doesn't, and he doesn't pull free from her. He simply lies there, curled on his side, and when his half-shadowed face slides into view his eyes are dull, his features as flat as his voice.

It was hard to tell, listening, but she thought he might be crying. Might have been crying, before she came in. It's only when she sees how utterly dry those dull eyes are that she realizes how much she was hoping he was.

His eyes move. Swing up to her. Nothing else does.

"What the fuck'm I here for?" Dry rustle, like wind through dead leaves. "Why did I try to come back?"

"You said you thought about me." She releases the blanket and lifts her hand again, and there's no caution when she combs his hair back from his face. The scar is hidden. If she wanted, she could pretend it isn't there at all. "When you were walkin'. Even when there was no moon."

He nods. Once, almost not at all. "I hate you too." His fingers tighten around hers, weaving between them. "Think I hate you most. You wouldn't leave me. You wouldn't let me stop."

She's a core of twisted muscle. The world blurs away. _You don't mean that._

But she knows better. She knows he does.

"It's alright." She leans over him, still stroking through his hair, as gentle as she can be. She didn't really think her nightmares would be prophecies, but here they are. Just not like she ever imagined. "You can hate me."

"I don't want to."

"I know."

He clenches his eyes shut, lips pulling into a pained grimace. "I think… I thought maybe you could help me. If I got to you. Maybe you could make it stop."

"I can't." She shakes her head, teeth closing briefly on her lip. "I'm sorry." Without meaning to she's lowering herself, sinking down to lie on the floor facing him, her palm resting against his jaw. And he's lifting his head slightly, pressing into the touch - almost nuzzling, weak. It's getting on to late afternoon and the tiny bit of sunlight that penetrates the curtains is creeping across the floor, leaching the color from everything it touches.

The dream. Hers. It falls on her, knocks her down - that she was _ready_ to make it stop, then. She was ready to do that for him. She was ready to get it right. He was so fucking _tired_ and he was in Hell, and yes, she was ready to help him. To free him.

Maybe he survived the initial gunshot, but it didn't end there. It never ends. Every second, he's fighting to stay alive.

That was always true.

"Don't leave me alone." A breath slips out of him, somehow both long and shallow, and she doesn't take her own until she hears him pull it back in, and then he rips it all away from her and leaves her airless, floating in vacuum, only him to hold onto. Somehow that feels right.

 _I love you._

 _Beth, I love you so much._

She closes her eyes, joins him in the dark.

 _Oh._

She was done with hesitating and she doesn't start it up again. She shifts closer, presses in, slides her hand up to cup the back of his head. A tremor ripples through him but he still doesn't pull away, and she lays her lips against his brow. Maybe his hand was cold - is even now - but his forehead is hot as a fever, as if there's a fire raging behind his skull. And she can't put it out, but she can take his heat. She's here with him, safe in the dark, and no one else will see them.

She doesn't know when she last sang. She's not sure she would call this singing. But something does hum out of her throat and into his skin, and maybe it vibrates into the rest of him, because he was limp before but now she feels him _relax,_ gradual but unmistakable.

He says she can't bring him back, and she can believe he's right. But she can be with him where he is. She can do that much.

Maybe she was already there.

 _you build it up, you wreck it down_  
 _you burn your mansion to the ground_  
 _when there's nothing left to keep you here_  
 _when you're falling behind in this big blue world_

 _you got to hold on, hold on_  
 _you got to hold on_  
 _take my hand, I'm standing right here_  
 _you got to hold on_


	19. and all that could have been

**Chapter 19: and all that could have been**

Actually, you said _Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

The light is almost gone when she opens her eyes.

She lies there for a moment, motionless, staring into the shadows. Staring at _him_ and how he's lost in them - merely featureless darkness in the vague shape of a man, his hand still curled loosely with hers. Still cold. She's not sure she was sleeping; it's been at least a couple hours since she lay down and she doesn't remember them passing with any kind of clarity, but they don't have the blank quality of unconsciousness. And she doesn't recall any dreams.

He's not sleeping. She doubts he did. And when she pulls in a deeper breath, his hand twitches minutely.

Someone who wasn't as familiar with the ways of his body might mistake it for something involuntary. She knows better.

He's been awake and he's been watching her.

Her other hand is cupped over the side of his neck, fingers partially combed into his hair, and now she withdraws it and settles it on the floor between them, swallowing hard. She spots a flicker in the empty silhouette that is his face; blinking, maybe.

If he isn't moving, it might be because he still basically _can't._

She's overwhelmed with the urge to say something, and it robs her of any words she might have employed. She simply looks at him, wishing she could see more than she can, because he's far too much like a ghost right now. It's far too easy to look at him and see absence. A blank hole in the world that he should have occupied. The kind of thing she saw over and over in the span of hundreds of miles northward. Gazing into the grimy window of the van, not the landscape blurring by outside but her own dim reflection, and searching for him beyond it.

Like she would turn and he would be right there sitting beside her, all gentle bemusement. Wondering aloud how she could have been so wrong. _You made a mistake, girl._ That _wasn't me._

 _It was just a bad dream._

She didn't wake up because she can't wake up. Not ever.

In a whisper: "Are you alright?"

As stupid a question as it ever is. He shakes his head, once, and she feels like shit.

But she remembers the gray water. What it was like down there. What she did. What she didn't do.

"Did you eat today?"

Another single shake of the head.

"If I get you some food, do you think you can eat it?"

He hesitates. He hesitates for a long moment. Then - again, once - he nods. And a softer whisper than hers, dry, the rustle of bones: "I'll try."

"Alright." But she makes no move to get up. She tightens her hand around his, fingers woven, breathing and listening to him breathe. It's marvelous. For a few precious seconds she can let go of everything else, his mad eyes and the words he hurls at her and at everyone and at himself, the gradual destruction he's visiting on his own skin, his voice when he screamed and lunged at her in those first minutes and the gray Hell he's lost in now, and focus on the sheer wonder that is his survival. That he _did_ make it. Maybe not all of him, but he did.

He did come back to her. Even if he doesn't know why.

And he's still trying.

"I'll be right back," she says softly, and she pushes herself up, ignoring the groaning ache in her neck and back - her body is far too used to beds now, and she doesn't like that - and gets clumsily to her feet. He's watching her as she does, and she can see the very faint glitter of his eyes as they move.

It doesn't bother her that he tracks her all the way to the door. It means he's _here._ He really sees her. He cares enough to focus on her. Cares enough to know what she's doing. Where she is.

What he said.

So she stops at the door, her hand on the knob, and she looks back. She didn't say it, after he did. She sang, or she made a rough attempt at singing, and that was the only way she knew how to answer him then. This is not how she would have chosen saying it, like an afterthought, like something she merely happened to forget to give him. But it doesn't feel like that, and in fact it's as if she's rushing back across that expanse of floor and dropping to her knees at his side. Like she can get it right this time.

She can't. She can't ever get it right. She's pretty certain they both lost that chance a long time ago.

So she'll give him what she can.

"I love you, Daryl," she breathes, and all the way across the room she hears him sigh.

She opens the door, steps out of the darkness, closes it behind her.

* * *

Carol is in the kitchen in the last of the evening light, long shadows cast across her, cleaning her gun. The pieces are spread out in front of her on a towel, her hands shiny with oil; it's a familiar smell, redolent with memory, and despite everything horrible that should be attached to it, it's a good smell. It means calm, at least a modicum of safety, because you don't clean your gun unless you have time to sit down and spread out a little and you won't need to shoot it for a bit.

So Beth pauses in the doorway, half closes her eyes and inhales, and Carol looks up, gives her a small and unreadable smile, goes back to the gun.

Not asking. Letting Beth choose how much she wants to say. If she wants to say anything at all. Even with that newer coldness, the steel bars knitting themselves over her, Carol can do this. Can be a species of kind, especially to her, and that's been the case since Atlanta. Not the same as treating her softly, like a hurt child.

No one gets to be that way anymore. Including hurt children.

"He needs to eat."

Carol nods. "He hasn't. I know."

"You didn't try to make him." It's not a question, and as statements go it's not an angry one. Beth can guess what trying to _make_ him do anything like that tends to result in. And anyway, regardless of the outcome, it won't help him. They can't force him to want to keep going. They can't force him to try.

She doesn't even want to. Not like that.

Carol lays down the gun, regards her evenly. "What do you think?" She nods at the fridge. "There's a couple slices of apple pie. Not exactly the most nutritious thing ever, but." She shrugs, and Beth nods, because yes. It's food.

She cross the floor, glancing at the wide window and blinking as a direct beam of sun passes across her face and strikes her eyes. She gets it, and she did to begin with: the darkness in which he's made his den is comfortable, and not just because of the damage in his head. He's removed from everything that way. All the edges are dulled. The world doesn't cut him.

The only thing that makes him bleed is himself.

That's control, and control is something he must feel unbearably short of. He's beset by pain he can only mitigate with drugs, but he can cause his own pain, determine when and how he feels it. He can hurt himself and that almost certainly calms him, and he can hurt others and that might calm him too even if it makes him feel like shit.

Which it does. She knows that without a single particle of doubt.

"You should eat too," Carol says behind her when she reaches the fridge, fingers wrapped around the handle. Beth pauses, head down. Not arguing. "It's been hours since you went in there. We already had dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"Neither is he."

"He's done this before." Again, not a question. She pulls the fridge door open and peers inside: jars of some kind of jam, a foil-covered dish of casserole, a head of lettuce. Some strawberries. Eggs. Leftover spaghetti. Pitcher of iced tea. Her fridge looks almost identical but all at once something about it kicks her in the chest and she's back in the farm kitchen on a warm summer evening, Mama outside singing to herself as she takes the laundry down from the line, cows lowing in the distance. The nickering of one of the horses as Shawn brings her in from afternoon exercise. Daddy in the parlor, studying his battered old Bible with his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and a glass of iced tea sweating gently on the table beside him.

She would get whatever she was in here for, maybe some of that iced tea, go in and sit in there with him and play the ancient upright piano. And after a while he would lay the Bible down and just listen to her, and she would play an old hymn for him, one of his favorites, and sing.

 _are there anybody here like Mary, a-weepin'_  
 _call to my Jesus and he'll draw nigh_  
 _are there anybody here like Mary, a-weepin'_  
 _call to my Jesus and he'll draw nigh_

 _glory glory, glory glory_  
 _glory be to my God on high_

 _are there anybody here like Peter, a-sinkin'_  
 _call to my Jesus and he'll draw nigh_  
 _are there anybody here like Peter, a-sinkin'_  
 _call to my Jesus and he'll draw nigh_

 _glory glory, glory glory_  
 _glory be to my God on high_

"Beth?"

She hauls in a breath, squeezes her eyes shut and inhales the smell of artificial cold. She reaches blindly for the pie, closes her fingers on the dish, practically yanks it out and lets the door swing closed. For a few seconds she only stands there, waiting for her gut to stop churning.

She's spent over a year now trying to forget. After another year trying to remember. Holding on.

It's so unfair.

"I'm alright."

"No one's alright anymore." When she turns, Carol is pointing at the seat to her right. "Get some pie and sit."

"I should get back to him."

"He'll keep for a bit. Maybe even could use a few minutes on his own. You know he's not used to being with anyone for a long time at a stretch." She glances over her shoulder, and Beth catches her eyes flicker briefly into something softer than the steel that's usually set behind them. "Maybe not even you. Not yet."

For a moment she thinks about saying no. No fucking way. This feels like too much. Lying beside him in that dimness, he peeled away a long strip of barely dried scab and she let him do it - _helped_ him - and now she's skinless and glistening wet, the air like sandpaper through which she scrapes herself.

But maybe she could use a few minutes too.

She gets a fork and sits down with the dish in front of her. Getting a plate seems like a waste of a plate, which she supposes would be a waste of water. She stabs the fork into it and stares down at it: the broken flaking crust, the slick wetness beneath, the way it oozes yellowish-clear like plasma. Slices of baked apple like thick chunks of fat.

She presses the palm of her other hand against her forehead and leans on it. She can do this. It's just pie, for God's sake. It's just pie and her brain is intact. She has no excuse anymore.

"You're not alright," Carol repeats softly, her strong hands in smoothly practiced motion. "He didn't do that to you, but him being here hasn't been making it better."

She almost wants to laugh. She doesn't. "You tryin' your hand at bein' Denise?"

"I'm trying my hand at not being an idiot. I wasn't one to begin with."

The fork clatters onto the dish. She was already half covering her face; now she finishes the job, puffs air between her fingers and pressed their tips so hard into her eyes that sparks explode against her retinas.

Her hand smells like him. She could never put a name to that smell. It was strong, on the road, but even unbathed, under the sweat and the old blood and the countless layers of campfire smoke, she could tell it wasn't unpleasant. She liked it. After things got better, she came to associate it with being safe. With resting. With smiling, a little.

Her smile, not his. And that was fine.

"What do you want, Carol?"

"To talk to you."

"You're doin' it."

"I'm talking _at_ you." She sighs. "I live with Daryl, Beth. I know it when I'm in the middle of it." Pause, and though Beth doesn't lower her hands, she hears the solid, muffled sound of the gun being laid on the towel. "When you walked out of there just now, how was he?"

 _You know_ , she wants to scream. For half a second she's sure she has, sure she can feel it rough down the back of her throat. Hear it echoing off the chrome, the tile, all those clean walls. _You know exactly how he fucking is, you see it every day, you see it and you know exactly how impossible it is to do anything about it._

 _You know exactly how impossible it is to bring him back._

"He was lyin' there," she murmurs. Because she can only brush Carol off so hard, for so long. Her resistance here has never tremendously strong, and she didn't use to dislike it but then again it never really used to matter. She didn't have much to resist. "He was quiet. He wasn't sayin' much."

"What did you do?"

She drops her hands. They thump, mostly limp. "How the hell is that your business?"

"It's not." Carol is leaning her chin on her knuckles, gaze cool and steady as ever. "So tell me to fuck off and leave."

It would be a reasonable thing to do. So of course she doesn't. She sits there with fucking pie in front of her, the light dying all around her and the shadows closing in - like ghosts of _him,_ or harbingers he's sent to her - and something cold and dense that's far too tired to be anger sitting low in her gut. She doesn't want Carol to fuck off.

Just like part of her doesn't really want to go back into that room. Be in that darkness with him, probably silent, and listen to him screaming in her head.

"I was just… I was with him. I didn't do anythin'. I guess." She runs her fingertips down the gleaming handle of the fork, its gracefully swooping pattern. "Talked to him a little."

"What did he say?"

 _Everything. He said everything._ Her teeth close on her lip and she turns to look at the window again - _at,_ not _out of._ The way the light is hitting it is casting every scratch and fragment of dust into opaque red brilliance and she can't see through the glass at all.

"He said he hates his brain." She swallows and it sinks down her throat, a cold lump to join what's already inside her. "He said he hates me."

"Do you believe him?"

"Yeah."

Low, and no hesitation. She doesn't have to think about it. Gazing into that hard red light and feeling it - not cold, not heavy, and not stinging. It wasn't unexpected enough to sting. Didn't have the requisite suddenness. She wasn't even surprised when he said it.

It's not like she hasn't already heard it more than once, every time she goes back to that hallway in her dreams.

"Part of him hates everything right now. Himself more than any of the rest of it." A flicker in the corner of her vision as Carol sweeps a hand back through her hair, tips her face up to the ceiling. "I've seen that before, too."

That makes her swing her head around, eyes widening slightly. This shouldn't exactly surprise her either; Carol was with him before, since Atlanta, and there's a lot about what happened in those first days that Beth doesn't know about and hasn't asked. But there's something about how she says it. A trembling around the edges that Beth can't recall when she last heard. This is a wound, and it's a very old one and mostly scarred over - but only mostly.

"When?"

"At the farm."

Carol lowers her head, meets Beth's gaze with hers. A trembling there too - inside her. Those steel bars are still down, and while what's inside isn't soft and isn't even vaguely weak, it's alive and beating and lit with more than the gray light of survival instinct. "It wasn't like this. Wasn't as bad. I mean, of course it wasn't. But it was the same."

She's quiet a moment. Beth watches her, fingers tracing the fork's lines, and the clink as its edge touches the plate is unnaturally loud. All at once the house seems very empty, her hand the only movement. Nothing in any of the other rooms. She wonders where everyone's gone.

Or if maybe she's the one who went somewhere. Stepped sideways into another world - that nightmare mirror world where Daryl appears to spend so much of his time. If Carol is here too, it's because Carol has excellent reasons to know it every bit as well.

Except really, all of them do. No one gets to be all right anymore.

"After my… After Sophia." Her eyes flick down, flick back up. "You were... distracted, I'm guessing you didn't really have any reason to notice what was going on with the assholes camped on your damn lawn." Thin smile, quick. Gone without a trace. "It hit all of them hard, but him…" She shakes her head. "It destroyed him. Ripped him apart inside. He didn't want anyone else to see, and he went up to his camp on that hill, stayed there. I finally went up after him."

Another pause, and this time she hears her own voice cut through it, a dry whisper. "What happened?"

"You know him. What do you think?" That thin smile again, pain twisted through it. Old pain. "He was as mean as he could think to be. He was cruel. He said…" She releases a long breath. "He said I was afraid. He said I was afraid because I was alone, because I lost everyone. Thing is? He was right. And he knew it. He wouldn't have said it if he didn't know, if he didn't know it would hurt worse than just about anything else he could say."

Beth nods. Of course. Of course he said that. Of course he wouldn't have said anything else. Of course he would take everything he had that was soft, that could possibly be kind, and he melted it down into bullets and he fired them at point blank range and put all the explosive power of his agony behind them. Of course he saw an outstretched hand and snarled and bit, because he was hurting and he was frightened, and he didn't know why.

And he didn't know how to make it stop.

"I looked at him, right in the eyes, and I saw it then. Just… hate. For everything. For me. For himself, for feeling it." She rolls a shoulder, mouth twisting. "He didn't want to. Every single thing he said, it got worse and worse. He was drowning in it. And he could never have let me help him."

"That's what he said."

The light scatters; a bird flying by outside, another, a flock of them, and her attention follows. They dapple the sunlight like leaves in the breeze and she thinks of his face gleaming wet when he finally turned to her, how afterward in a few unmoored moments - they seemed like dreams later, impossible even after the shack burned - he leaned his head into her hands and allowed her to wipe away his tears.

"He didn't want to," she murmurs. Her eyes are unfocused, everything unfocused, the swooping lines like frozen wind under her fingers. "When we were together… He did the same thing. Same goddamn thing." She stares down at her wrist as she turns it - it's bare today, and the broken tracks of her veins are exposed. "He yelled about this."

 _Like it made me weak,_ she almost says, but the words disintegrate on her tongue.

Maybe because part of her wonders now.

"You saved my life."

Suddenly everything in focus, and snapped into Carol's calm face. She doesn't think she gasped, but she's not certain. She never told anyone about this. She's never known exactly why, but the longer she's kept it to herself, the more important it's seemed that she keep it that way.

She should have known there was at least one person she wouldn't _need_ to tell.

"You did," Carol repeats, reaches across the table and lays her hand over Beth's upturned wrist. No tension in her fingers; it's only a weight, and it's a weight that she can't seem to get out from under. "I think you saved his life too. Didn't you?"

Nothing. The birds are gone.

"You've done it once already."

The laugh barks out of her, bitter and grating in her chest. Sooner or later it seems like it always comes to this: saving him or damning him, and she doesn't get the luxury of anything in between. Even if no one says it like that, it's there all the same. "So you think I can do it again."

"I don't know if you can. I don't know if anyone can."

Beth blinks at her. This is unexpected. Though this is _Carol,_ so maybe it shouldn't be. "So-"

"So I know you're going to try. Like Rick is trying, like he wants everyone else to try. Like I've been. The thing is…" A single stroke of Carol's thumb across her wrist, at the place where those blue tracks flow into the heel of her palm, and she shivers. "If you try this hard and it turns out you can't… You saved him once. You lost him once, and I know you can't stop thinking it was your fault. I'm watching what's happening to you now, and honestly? I'm wondering if you can go through it again. I'm wondering if that's something you can go into and come out the other side."

She's not going to eat any fucking pie. The pie is a joke. Looking at it now, all she wants to do is hurl it at Carol, hurl it at the floor, watch the plate shatter like bone and the lumpy wet apple slices spill across the floor like crushed brain.

She jerks her wrist free, though it's really more of a twitch. "Can _you?_ "

Carol doesn't make her wait, as she withdraws her hand and picks up the gun. She nods.

"It's like he said, Beth. I already lost everyone." She lifts her chin at the doorway and the hall beyond. "You should go back to him."

She picks up the pie and she does.

* * *

He hasn't moved. But it's not like she expected him to.

He does move when she lowers herself to the floor beside him. He stirs, rolls a little further onto his back so it's easier to look up at her. Some of it is that she can feel his movement. and hear enough to identify his position. Some of it is that she can still see the dull glitter of his eyes.

She sets the pie down, and when she reaches for his shoulder he doesn't pull away.

"I brought you apple pie." She clears her throat and wishes those two words didn't sound so ridiculously out of place in this setting. Cheerful and wholesome. Something to eat warm with ice cream and a happy family. "Can I turn the light on?"

She touches his jaw in time to feel him nod.

The lamp is glaringly bright without the shade and she winces when she switches it on, hearing the sound echoed behind her. She removes it from the table and puts it on the floor on the far side of the bed, reducing it to a weird hard glow that casts looming shadows across the room. She doesn't like it at all, truthfully preferred the dark, but she figures he shouldn't try to eat that way. And she's not about to attempt to make him go out.

He pulls the blanket further up around his shoulders when she goes back to him and her chest tightens, but he's not retreating. He's looking right at her, and she doesn't see any fear.

Though she also doesn't see much of anything else.

"'m cold," he breathes, and stops there, apparently uninterested in elaborating or attaching it to anything else.

"You didn't eat. That's probably not helping." She settles a hand on his shoulder again. "C'mon. Sit up."

For a long moment he doesn't do anything. She's not positive he blinks. Then he shifts and slowly pushes up, clutching the blanket against himself, head hanging. He moves as if it's taking everything he has, as if he's fighting for every vertical inch, and it's very possibly because he is.

 _Fighting_.

He squints down at the pie, expressionless except for an air of vague bewilderment that's deeper than usual. She wonders with a sudden weary lurch if she's going to have to feed him.

But then he's reaching for it. Like she saw a glimpse of in the dimness, both his hands are streaked with blood as they emerge from beneath the blanket, and she wrestles back a gasp. She's not sure she's seen them this bad - large parts of the area around his nails are completely stripped of cuticles and skin, some almost to his knuckles, the tips and pads bitten open, several of the nails chewed far past the edge of the quick. She has no idea how he can touch anything without enough pain to - as she supposes they still say - make a grown man cry.

Though she hasn't seen him do that, she realizes. At all.

At any rate, he does touch the plate and the fork and doesn't seem even vaguely bothered, and she sits back and watches as he raises both, sits crosslegged and hunched and takes an unhurried, mechanical bite.

"I can't taste it," he says quietly, merely informing her of this fact, and takes another one.

She watches him eat long enough to be certain that he will and then she looks away, around the room again, gaze lingering on nothing in particular. She saw most of what there was to see when she first came in, though with the lamp where it is, everything is at once both too small and too big, all the angles leaning wrong. It _feels_ wrong, uneasy waves of tension in her middle, and she decides to turn it off again as soon as she can.

But then, without meaning to, she's watching him again. The wild black mess that is his hair, his ruined hands, flashes of the sharp line of his jaw and cheek as he chews. Sitting beneath the blanket he's almost entirely formless, just a pair of hands and a head, and abruptly she wants to drag it off him and prove to herself that the rest of him is there.

Stupid.

She can't stop thinking about those first nights by the fire.

He eats the whole thing in that stilted, mechanical fashion, and when he's done she takes the plate out of his loose grip, sets it aside, gazes down at his fingers. They're just hanging there, held where they were when they were doing a job, as if he's forgotten to put them down. He's not looking at them.

He's looking at her.

"Did you say it?"

He doesn't have to explain. She draws a breath and holds it, and has no idea what the fuck else to do. It did happen, the darkness didn't swallow it, and he was never going to just leave it there.

"I did," she says softly. "I said it."

He nods. "I thought you did." Pause. Then: "I don't know anymore. If anything really happens." He tilts his head to one side, face half invisible, and for once it's not that eerily animal gesture. "Y'know?"

"Yeah. I know."

"I do love you." He lowers his gaze to his hands, flexes them slightly. "I never loved anyone before."

 _Oh._ Oh, _God,_ nothing about this is the way it's supposed to be. Not one fucking thing. "Sure you have."

He shakes his head. "Not like this. I don't…" He flexes his hands again, tighter, and a tiny whimper escapes him. The middle finger of his right hand is worryingly swollen. "I dunno what to do about it."

"You don't have to do anything." She reaches for him, closes her hands gently around his wrists instead of his fingers and holds on, knobs of bone fitted into her palms. _You never had to do anything. You just had to be there._

 _I just wanted you to be there._

"I do. I should. People do." He turns his wrists in her grasp but doesn't try to work them free, and when he leans in a little he seems to be examining them. Searching for something. "I wanted to give you things. When we almost stayed. I wanted to give you somethin' but I didn't have nothin'. We had food. You had that piano. We didn't need nothin' else."

He raises his head, and his smile is very sweet and very sad, and in the nightmare light of the lamp it looks like the beginnings of a scream. "I just wanted to get you that damn dog."

 _Fuck_. She already knows where this is going and she wants to haul him back, fling herself in front of it, block it with her own skull - _anything_ to keep him away from it. Where she knows he went after he lost her, over and over, because she knows _him_ and it's only what he would do. Like a mutt chained up in a yard, pacing in a circle at the length of his chain until he's worn a groove in the dirt.

She sweeps her thumbs up and down his wrists, tugs him in. "Daryl-"

"The fuck can I give you now?" His voice is soft and utterly ruthless. Cruel, but not to her. Listening to him now, it's hard for her to believe he ever _could_ be, and it's a burning fist around her heart. "Look at me. Look at this." His hands. He moves them, lifts them higher for her to see. "I can't even give you me. All I ever fuckin' had and I'm not all here anymore. And the rest of me is-"

" _Stop._ "

It's a hiss, and it barely manages to even be that much, but it tears out of her and it works - it stops him cold, and he gazes at her with dry eyes that she has to struggle to meet, because it's all there and it's plain. It always was. Today isn't the first time he said it. He told her months ago, looked at her in the candlelight and told her the only way he could.

Because there was too much of him then, and he got in his own fucking way. Now enough of him is torn away that he can let it go.

"I'm alive because of you." She releases one of his wrists and reaches up, combs her fingers into his hair and pushes it back from his face. The left side - she doesn't mean to, and when she sees the scar it almost knocks the rest of the words out of her. "You already gave me everythin'. Now you're here. I love you, I _do,_ and you're _right here._ "

 _And you're trying._

She doesn't mean to do what she does next, either, except she knows later that some part of her meant to in the deepest possible way, had in fact been waiting to do it for all those same months, and for so many of them had believed she would never be able to. She cups the back of his head - that _place,_ that awful place that shattered open but somehow closed again before all of him could bleed out and _that's all that matters -_ and draws him in, and he goes unresisting as she presses her lips to his brow.

Angles him upward just enough and presses her lips to his mouth.

He goes rigid. So does she.

This is where he wrenches away and does something horrible - hurts her, hurts himself, plunges into the pit inside his mind and doesn't emerge. This is where she fucks it up and he follows her, and nothing works out and everything crumbles into irreparable pieces. This is where she makes yet another mistake she can never undo, and for the rest of her life she wonders what might have happened if she had only gotten it right.

Except no.

No, because this is where he lifts his trembling fingers and ghosts their bloody tips over her cheeks, her jaw, the sides of her throat, as if he can't believe she's real. This is where he sighs and presses back firm and warm against her, smelling like apples and tasting of the last hints of sugar, and when she loses the rest of her mind and nudges his lips apart with hers and then with her tongue, he moans and opens to her and welcomes her in.

Nothing about this is the way was supposed to be, but it was _supposed to be,_ and as she lifts herself higher on her knees and kisses him deeper and slower and so careful, she thinks _fucked up_ and _far too late_ has to be better than _never._

It might even be good.


	20. echoing your voice

**Chapter 20: echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears**

 _We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero's shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She's there.

He doesn't think he's imagining it. It doesn't feel like a dream. He told her that he doesn't know if anything really happens anymore and he was telling one of his deepest possible truths, but at some point he has to go with a baseline of _real_ \- and this feels real.

It's impossible but it's real.

He doesn't even know what she's doing for a few seconds, when every muscle in his exhausted body locks up at the touch of her lips on his. He knows this has happened to him at least once before and he knows there's a word for it and it means something, but it's so utterly bizarre and so utterly outside the bounds of what's _supposed to happen_ to him with her that it breaks open every part of his perception and takes his higher-level processing abilities with it. That she's touching him at all: ludicrous. Absurdity beyond absurdity.

That she's touching him like _this:_ there might be a word in another language to capture it, but he's reasonably certain that English is lacking.

So he touches her. And she's so warm and so _there,_ and she feels so fucking _good_ , and the entire world is like an oncoming train but it's gentle, gentle as she is, and all he can do is melt beneath her. Whatever she wants to do with him, she can do. Whatever she wants to take from him, she can have.

Though this should _finally_ be too much. Shrieking banshee flames loosed from the heavens and splitting his head open, striking him dead. Because he _dares_ , because he has the audacity to exist in this moment and to _like_ it, _want_ it, his diseased heart and the flesh beneath his skin seething with infection, and as she parts his lips with hers he knows he's going to vomit reeking bile down her throat.

He doesn't.

He doesn't do anything of the kind. He opens to her because he could never do anything else in the end, and as her tongue slips into his mouth and alongside his, there's no word in _any_ language for how she tastes.

He doesn't touch her anymore. Not even sure what the rest of him is doing but his hands suddenly hurt so much - couldn't feel them at all because he couldn't feel anything except blank weariness as gray and dry as ash, but now as sensation floods back into him it brings pain on its tide, and it's so bad he wants to scream.

But he can't stop this. He can't pull away. If he does, it might be gone and he'll never get it back, because he doesn't get to have things like this. Anything good. Anything beautiful. If he has it now he's stealing it and he deserves the harshest punishment she can invent. She should beat him, burn him with every one of his cigarettes, peel the rest of his filthy skin off with his own knife.

Except she won't. She's kissing him. That's what it is, the word and the softness of it, of her, her fingers combing through his hair and her mouth working over his. She's _kissing him._

She does for a while, and he gives up and drowns in the sweet hot taste of her - _God just please let him die like this and he'll die in ecstasy -_ and sinks away from the surface of the pain.

He walked six hundred miles of Hell for her, because his last desperate hope was that she could make it stop.

It can't possibly last. But for now she has.

* * *

It doesn't last.

Later he only remembers it in broken fragments, because he only experiences it in broken fragments. That at some point he's not kissing her anymore and he's huddled shivering under the blanket, his head on her breast, and she's rocking him slowly and murmuring something he can't understand. He loses himself again in the rhythm of her heart and what he sees when he listens to it: a glistening fist of a muscle throbbing beneath her sternum inches from his ear, his mouth, and all her blood a torrent through her veins. He dreams that there's no bone between him and it, that he can lay his hand over it and cup it and he would be so careful with it, remove it from her chest and cradle it close to his. He knows how precious it is.

He knows what he would do to keep it beating.

In his dreams, stirring and feeling her pulse against his lips as he tilts his face into the hollow of her throat, his hands slick and that strong beat in his palms.

Except then the storm crashes in and it comes out of a vicious nowhere.

And it's _never_ been this bad.

Lightning roars out of the thunderclouds and stabs serrated blades into his skull, pierces his eyes and saws through his optic nerves. He bites down so hard his neck aches, and he tries to plead with her to make the light go away. It's horrible, that light, and for the few seconds he opens his eyes he sees a vista he last saw out there on the road - beyond her merciful shadow there's nothing but flat dry wasteland, fires everywhere and those massive, relentless herds of the dead, and at the end of all of it that pillar of darkness, which he thought was her and this place and now he wonders.

He doesn't, though. It hurts too much to wonder anything. Thinking of any kind is brutality. He rolls onto his side as the light goes out and the red behind his eyes goes black, wood cool against his cheek and his head pounding into the floor. It's possible that he's lifting it and smashing it down, trying to club himself unconscious if he can't beat the storm clear. It's equally possible that he's not moving at all, but either way her hands are there on his face and in his hair and he curls into her touch and sobs.

No tears. But words. Pills. Begging her grace: _please get him the fucking pills._ It's too late to stop it but maybe they can still muffle it enough for him to sleep. Maybe he doesn't have to be here for the worst of it.

 _Worst_ means something new, though. He didn't honestly think that could happen. But new levels of _worst_ keep opening up. It's not better since he got here, he thinks, lying alone in the dark with groans rasping in his throat. Since he walked through those gates it's been nothing but a hard slide down. Some stops along the way, some tantalizing steps up, but in the end he always falls further and further, and he has no fucking idea where the bottom is.

If there even is one.

The door opens and it's like the world cracking. He weathers it because he knows what it means: her hands again and smooth little tablets against his lips, and she helps him sit up enough to swallow them without choking. Then there's water and he _does_ almost choke on that and drops back, wracked with coughing, every drop of blood in his body swelling his brain.

Cringing backward. Comforting fact of the wall behind. He's not safe because he's never safe, but this is the closest he ever gets, groping for the blanket as he burrows into the pillows. They can't protect him. Nothing can. He's naked and skinned under a wildly spinning sun, writhing in the dirt like an insect under a sadistic child's magnifying glass. Saw that once; didn't want to look but if he didn't he was a _fuckin' pussy_ and a _stupid little faggot_ and fists almost always follow words like that, so he looked. Rough laughter and a mean grin - didn't he love that grin? He's almost certain he did. Loved it and hated it with simple ferocity, and because he had no choice he crouched there in the depths of a ruthless summer afternoon and watched a tiny creature die in pain it couldn't begin to understand.

Nothing to understand. It was senseless. Meaningless. It was the dark wind blowing through his life.

He took his cue and smiled, because he had to. Which is why he's done all kind of things he didn't want to do.

He can't escape the certainty that someone is smiling at him now. Someone is watching this and grinning at it. Someone is taking _pleasure_ in what's happening to him, someone is _making it happen,_ and he's mouthing _why_ into the smothering shelter of the pillow - which was the first thing he said in the hospital, when he woke up in the midst of his own wreckage and understood that he was alive.

 _Why._

Not a question. He can't imagine an answer.

 _Why_ when the pain slammed into him, when he lost days to thick fogs of it and all the morphine in the world didn't seem to be enough and they had such a limited supply anyway, and he wanted to rip out his own nerves with his bare hands. _Why_ when he had to eat through a fucking tube, when he was lying there in that fucking bed _full_ of tubes and wires and staring at the featureless gray ceiling until he was half certain he was blind, and that blindness wasn't darkness but instead was nothing at all. _Why_ when he not only couldn't feed himself but couldn't bathe himself, couldn't do anything for himself, when he had to piss and shit into a fucking pan and _look_ at whoever took it away unless he squeezed his fucking eyes closed and refused. _Why_ when he had to relearn how to talk, how to walk, and was trapped and screaming inside his own body and head, which was like living in tight quarters with someone who wanted nothing more in the world than to torture him.

When it was like living with his father. Every second of every day, it was like that.

 _Why_ when the skinless eyeless horrors first crawled out of the walls and grinned at him, when black blood first started to drip from the ceiling and ants started marching across his face and worms wriggled through the holes in his skull while the maggots munched away at his decaying brain tissue, when he turned his head and looked out the window and watched Atlanta burn.

 _Why_ when he took the first cop down with a scalpel in the side of the throat. _Why_ when he took the next one in the dark corridor and felt her neck snap in his hands. _Why_ with blood in his mouth, on his fingers, smearing it along the wall and ignoring the screams of the strangers in their blue-green scrubs as they stumbled over themselves to run from him. _Why_ crouched over that mewling doctor who _forced_ him to live and never asked his permission, the jelly of a burst eyeball packed under his thumb and more blood running warm down his wrist, staring ahead at the door and knowing where he had to go.

But _why._

Every excruciating step north made a litany. _Why why why._

 _Why am I here. Why did I come back._

Her.

He forgot she was there. The return of her hands, stroking over his face and his neck, his back, pulling him against her and wrapping herself around him. It hurts to touch her but he does anyway because it's still a better alternative to the agony in his head; he clutches at her and imagines again that her breastbone is gone, cut away like a body on an autopsy table. There's nothing between him and her, and now her heart is gone too, her lungs are gone, her chest cavity soft and wet and hollowed out for him, and he can curl up inside it and pull her skin over himself like a blanket and sleep.

He can't. He can't sleep. He carried the nightmare of that hospital room north with him, and he opens his eyes and sees things moving in it, familiar things: the dull rust-gleam of jagged teeth, eyes like the distant glow of infernal fire. Crawling down the walls on bony spider-legs, crawling across the ceiling and grinning down at him, rolling black seas of ants following in their wake. Maggots raining in cold little wiggles onto his face, into her hair, squirming into his mouth and nose. Monsters looming over her, over them, heads jerkily spinning as they reach out with claws like hypodermic needles dripping venom.

Fire outside. Endless fire. They still don't know. They don't know that they're trapped.

They don't know that they don't belong here.

 _Why_.

And then he's forcing his hands into fists like swarms of stinging wasps and trying to hit her, snarling at her to get the fuck away, get _away, you bitch, you fucking bitch, don't you fucking touch me. You did this to me. You weak, pathetic little cunt, you weren't worth it. You could never be worth this. I hate you. I fucking hate you. I should have let you die._

 _It should have been you._

If he hits her at all the blows are weak and clumsy and can't hurt her much. And anyway they turn themselves inward and he's beating at himself, shuddering in waves of nauseated horror and clinging to her because oh Christ oh _Christ, no, I love you, I'm sorry, I'm so fucking sorry, you were so worth it. You're worth anything. I'd do it again, I'd go through it a thousand fucking times. I love you so much, please, please stay. Please don't leave me. Oh my God, I can't do this, don't leave me alone. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it. I fucking swear, I didn't._

He did.

And she knows it.

 _You were supposed to make it stop._ Her hands, her heart, her mouth. Enfolding him. Making a home for him inside of her. She always has. It's how she's always been. _You were supposed to make it stop. You lying whore._

 _But it's okay if you don't. It's all right. I love you so it's all right. I can be all right._

 _I want to get better._

No. He doesn't. Not really.

He just wants it to stop.

* * *

It does. Again. It won't last, but it does.

Lying in the final moments of the night with her in his arms, his hands and his head a sullen, unanimous throb, he watches the light seep into a clear sky. Inside and out, everything has gone quiet, the drained kind of calm that always comes after storms. He felt it with her before, and even if it wasn't exactly like this then - trembling against her with moonshine still bitter on his lips - it's near enough. It's not peace; it's merely that there's no rage left to make the thunder from. But it's something and he breathes into it, feels her breathe.

Except for the slow rise and fall of her ribcage, she's very still. Even that rise and fall is easy to pretend out of existence. Freeze her in place, a fairy tale princess, preserved.

Perfect.

The light is already too bright. He closes his eyes against it and returns to the dark, and she's waiting for him inside it, so warm and so sweet, and he loves her and she's with him at last. Just him. His.

Like it was supposed to be.

Above them, the lid shuts with a soft click.


	21. my favorite dreams of you

**Chapter 21: my favorite dreams of you still wash ashore**

 _Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live? Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She runs into Michonne at the bottom of the stairs. Literally, shoulder to side, and Michonne releases a soft _oof_ and takes a small, graceful step backward - dancer's moves, always - and turns to her.

It's mid-morning. The house is quiet, and as far as Beth can tell it has been for some time. She heard what sounded like Rick leaving not long after dawn. Nothing else. And Michonne makes about as much noise as a stalking cat on her loudest days. She gazes up at Michonne in the unusually dim, colorless light - clouds have blown in though there's nothing much about them that seems to threaten rain - and tries to think what to say.

It's like she's emerged from one world, the rules of which are guided by utter insanity, into a world of order, where certain things are expected of her. Coherent communication with other human beings is included in that list.

Thankfully Michonne goes first, fingering the shoulder strap of her sword. "How is he?"

And it's only now that it hits her: she was with him all night. All fucking night. Alone with him in his room, with her arms around him as he twisted and groaned and cursed her, begged her forgiveness - and then his arms around _her_ when she opened her eyes. And they've done that before.

But no, they never have. Not really.

Everyone in this house has to know it. And Maggie and Glenn will have noticed that she never came home. Someone will have gone to them and told them, allayed any fears.

Or most of them, anyway.

She sighs and looks down. Her shirt is rumpled, and there's enough light now to see that it's spotted with blood in a few places, the same on her jeans. He clutched at her in the worst of it, clung to her like she was the only thing keeping him from hurtling off into a void, and the thin scabs on his hands must have cracked and bled.

Why she's out here.

"I dunno," she says at last, because it's the truth and she has no reason not to tell it. She has no fucking idea how he is. He hates her and he loves her and last night was a howling nightmare that neither of them could find their way out of, holding hands like two fairy tale children lost in the deep dark woods, their breadcrumb trail devoured by carrion birds. The only thing that ended it was his exhaustion and then his unconsciousness - though she thinks the dawn may also have helped. He doesn't like full daylight, but sunrise is different.

Michonne nods, as if she expected this, but offers no comment. She also doesn't move.

"He's sleeping," Beth says, bites her lip and meets Michonne's strong, solid gaze. "His head was bad. His hands _are_ bad. Where's your first aid stuff?"

"You want me to get Denise?"

It would be smart to get Denise. It would be smart for a whole number of reasons, not least because she's now certain that his one swollen finger is incubating a potentially nasty infection, the edges of the wound which probably served as the point of entry stretched and puffy. She can do rudimentary cleaning and bandaging and even stitching, but that's a step beyond her.

And Denise should simply _know._

She shakes her head. Maybe it's selfish. Right now she doesn't give a fuck. "I'll get her later."

The look Michonne gives her is characteristically unreadable - except for its edges, which are all skepticism. But she won't push. Not now. Later, perhaps, but _later_ isn't here yet, and is and always has been completely out of Beth's control.

In an exhausting way, it was good when she finally accepted that.

"There's a kit in the downstairs bathroom." Michonne jerks her chin down the hall. "Carol's not around but I think Carl is upstairs if you need help with something."

"Carl hates every part of this."

"Yeah, he does." Beat of silence, and Michonne cocks her head, the corner of her mouth pulled tight. "You blame him?"

"Not even a little." She squeezes her hand into a fist, nails pushing her skin near the breaking point. She fully understands how and why Daryl might find pain an attach point. An anchor. _I hate it too._

But she loves him.

"I have to go out." Michonne seems to shrug something off, shake herself loose from it, and steps past Beth toward the door without another glance. It's not coldness, Beth knows. At least not really. It's not that she doesn't care; she cares as much as any of them, and probably more than some. This man who went out with her day after day and helped her search the wilderness for a monster, until he decided he wanted to try to start looking forward. This man who would have done anything for any of them, who _did_ in the end… Michonne knows that. Feels it. Knows what it costs. If she's looking at the worst of that cost now, she's well aware of how deep it runs. How it ravages.

She just can't do anything.

"Alright."

Beth is turning away, fixing her gaze down the hall and at the pale wood and the pale walls and the pale light washing over all of it - too easy to unfocus and slip into a kind of fog far too much like the restless dreams she left back there in his room - when Michonne releases her name on a breath and she halts.

Doesn't look back.

"Beth," Michonne says again, louder. Not much. "Thanks. For being here. Don't think anyone else could have."

That idea is not a comforting one. But the _thanks…_ She lifts an awkward shoulder and lets it fall. She's not sure what to say to that. Guesses Michonne isn't expecting a response anyway, so it's not like it matters.

The front door opens. Soft shuffle of feet, and a crow's _caaw_ cut off halfway through as it closes again.

There are things she has to do. There's the first aid kit, and he'll need water, and her throat feels like packed sand and her mouth tastes like sour milk, and she's beginning to realize just how ravenously hungry she is. And whether or not he wants it, she's going to make him eat as well.

But she stands there a few seconds longer, head tilted slightly to one side and her eyes half closed. It's so quiet. It was quiet last night, too, though at the same time it seemed roaringly loud. That was only one of the things that set it into the logic of a dream: he was whispering and muttering, moaning, hissing once or twice in sounds too thin to be genuine snarls, but he was also screaming and keening and shattering the walls with enraged howls. He shuddered against her, twitched and got his legs tangled in the sheets, gripped at her and once flailed weak, ineffective fists at her chest and head. And he was writhing, lunging at her, convulsing and clawing and beating at her. She should be covered in bruises. She should be bleeding from the places where he ripped her open with his ragged nails. His teeth.

But it's quiet, and she's unhurt. She looks down at her bare arms, and that pale light seeps the color out of her skin, emphasizing its unbroken smoothness.

Except for her wrist.

At some point last night diverged from itself and there were two versions, simultaneous in timing and effect, each perfectly true. She remembers them both. They aren't mutually exclusive.

She knows precisely when it happened, that moment of division. The exact second. The singular touch, and the faintly sugar-sweet taste of his lips.

 _I hate you, you worthless cunt. I should've let you die._  
 _God, no. I'm so sorry. Please. Please don't leave me._

 _I love you so much._

Her entire life has been a series of divisions. Losses. Layers being peeled back and torn away, her heart and head split down the middle with each piece gone. Like an onion, or a rose. She's being pared finer and finer. Sooner or later she'll be so thin she's transparent.

No. Not always. Because he came back.

Right now he's waiting for her. Even asleep, he's waiting.

She goes to get the kit.

* * *

He's still sleeping when she comes back.

Not that she's gone long but it feels like a while, like out there beyond his door even time doesn't work the same way. Stepping into the room and closing the door in near-silence, it's almost palpable: she's crossed a threshold of more than one kind, and now she's close to him in a way she could never on the other side of it. The ash-colored light in the room is brighter and it casts none of the skewed nightmare shadows the lamp threw the night before - really it hardly casts any shadows at all, and everything has a weird flat quality, like she's looking at an extremely realistic illustration. One of those background paintings in old movies.

Flat and colorless. Dark. Lit, but twisted and sharp and all wrong. And the pale hand of the moon creeping across the floor, which she didn't see last night but which she can easily imagine. Him lying there, where he is now, following its progress with his hollow eyes.

She's standing inside his fucking mind.

She's carrying a large glass of water, a couple of apples, and the first aid kit, and as this strikes her she shivers and almost drops them. She freezes, clutching them, waiting for the crash she knows she averted, staring at him with wide eyes as he stirs and mutters and curls himself further under the blanket.

Startled awake, there's no telling what his instincts might make him do. Before he even realized he was doing it.

He doesn't wake up. He subsides, descends back into wherever he's drifting, and she crosses the floor and sits down next to him, and she waits.

She's trusting the simple fact of her presence to gradually bring him to the surface and it does, over the course of - she guesses, though who the fuck knows - not quite half an hour. She can sense him returning, as if he's bleeding back into his own skin, filling the shell of himself, darker and more opaque. Tangible. He doesn't move at all the whole time, but when suddenly his eyes are open and keenly focused on her - no transition, no fluttering of his lids - it doesn't jar her.

She merely looks back for a moment. Then she doesn't hesitate, and she doesn't try to wrestle the impulse away. Apparently she's through with that bullshit, or she's too tired to keep it up, or all variations of that reason. She lifts a hand and strokes the wild strands of his hair back from his face, and her breath catches when his eyes slip closed again and he releases a sigh.

"Hi."

He doesn't reply. He lifts his head almost imperceptibly, meeting the touch, then relaxes. _Relaxes._ In a way she hasn't felt since…

Since he came to her that first night.

"How're you feelin'?"

Soft _mm_ noise. Hard to read. But it doesn't sound pained, and it doesn't sound dead or mechanical. It's him, depth and feeling, and responsive. She continues combing through his hair, idly fingering tangles loose - noting the oiliness.

"Should wash before I bandage 'em up. You should see Denise about the swollen one later, too. You think you can shower?" His hands are tucked under the blanket, but she doesn't need to see them to know they're still in ugly shape, still almost certainly painful with every point of contact. And water of any temperature, soap, scabs softening and falling off…

All at once and without warning: the image of standing in the shower with him and doing it for him. Working shampoo through his hair and soap over his skin.

She stiffens, nervous and positive that he's noticed - no way he didn't. That's not the kind of thing he'd miss. It's innocent, she's sure it is, nothing there heated or wanting, but the thick steam is curling into her lungs and sinuses, the warm water streaming down her back, the slickness of him under her hands. All hard muscle and bone beneath, because although he's put on a bit of weight he's still worryingly lean.

It's innocent because it has to be. Because there's kissing him and there's _that,_ and _that_ is territory there's no way she can enter. That's a border she absolutely cannot cross.

Not while he's like this.

She hasn't seen any indication that he's thinking about that anyway. If it comes down to it, she's never seen any indication that he's ever thought anything of the kind about _anyone_.

Even so.

He's gazing at her again, and his eyes flick to the glass, the apples, the first aid kit, comprehension flashing across his features. He returns his focus to her and nods, once, and starts to push himself up.

He moves gingerly, cautiously, as if he doesn't trust his body to follow directions. And he very likely doesn't; he and it aren't exactly getting along these days, just like he isn't getting along with any part of himself, and while she doesn't expect him to need help she's ready anyway. Last night he was literally struggling to move at all. Struggling to _struggle._ Now he can, but it's taking obvious effort.

His hands emerge. They're horrifying, and while last night they were technically worse - torn open and bleeding freely - she looks at them for half a moment and then has to look away.

She'll _have_ to look at them. He can't dress them himself, and she doesn't want to get Carol to do it. And no fucking way is she attempting to deputize Carl.

"They're not-" he starts, voice so hoarse it's barely above a whisper, and stops. She turns back to him and his head is lowered, face only partially visible, mouth a tight line. "Yeah. They're as bad as they look."

"Can you?"

"Said I could." He sounds faintly irritated, shifting out from under the blanket. He also doesn't sound entirely sure. "Think I ain't used to bein' hurt?"

"I think I don't want you to hurt any more than you have to," she says quietly, and he pauses and simply stares at her with those tired, haunted eyes, jaw working. It's not a look unique to this gruesome rebirth of him. She's seen it plenty of times before. Saw it a lot when it was just them - a dense mixture of annoyance and confusion and hopefulness, confronted with the possibility that someone gives a shit about him because they're too stupid to know better.

Too stupid to understand that he doesn't matter.

"So what the hell would you do?" It's not true meanness in his tone now, not genuine scorn, but it's not far from those things. That spiteful side of him - also familiar - has abruptly surged near the surface, and he might be close to the point of trying to slap her into the pain with him. With his words if not his hands. "Get in there with me? Wash my fuckin' back?"

This time she doesn't stiffen. He's studying her with narrowed eyes, waiting to see if she does - waiting to see if he's landed a blow. Done any damage. Waiting with combined eagerness and fear, and both are distant but both are there.

At his worst, he was never emotionally steady. He was never predictable, not in terms of timing. At his worst, she was never sure when he would whirl and bite.

Very calm, calmer than she honestly expects: "Do you need me to?"

He continues to stare at her for another stretched, coiled moment. Then he drops his eyes and shakes his head. She's not positive whether he's actually saying no, or whether it's a denial of something else. And right then something hardens in her, because he's in so much pain and there's nothing petty about any of it, but he's also a surly child, being resistant merely for the sake of not letting the grownup have her way too easily.

There isn't even any reason for him to be doing this. He just woke the fuck up. He's responding to nothing more than the haze of bitterness hanging over the contents of his head.

Once again, it's a severe iteration of something so well known that it's almost comforting.

She lays a light hand on his forearm, and he doesn't flinch. "Go. I'll be here."

Without another word of any kind, he shoves himself awkwardly to his feet and pads barefoot to the door, opens it and goes out. She listens, but she doesn't watch him. He wouldn't like that. That's fine.

This is proving not nearly as difficult as she thought it might be.

* * *

He comes back something like ten minutes later, wearing the same rumpled clothes - she supposes she'll try to get him to change - but with his hair damp and the blood washed from his hands. It's what she imagined would happen, though: some of the scabs rubbed away and the wounds oozing slow, clear plasma. He's holding them like they hurt, out in front of him and loosely open, no finger touching any other.

She watches him approach from her place on the floor, and he only manages to meet her eyes for a second or two before he ducks his head and appears to observe the progress of his feet.

He's embarrassed. She's not sure about what. Might be any number of things. Might be something that has no reality outside of his own fractured imagination.

Everything now should be different. But it's not. Or in so many ways it's totally the same. She's not sure whether or not she should find that reassuring.

She doesn't need to know. There are things she has to do.

She pats the floor beside her. "C'mere."

He goes to her and lowers himself to sit crosslegged, still not looking at her. She doesn't wait for him to do so and she doesn't say anything else; she opens the kit and pulls out gauze, bandages, antibiotic cream. This much is extremely simple and involves no navigation of his maze-like psyche. All she needs are her own hands.

She's most of the way through applying the cream when he speaks.

"You stayed." He pauses. "With me. All night."

It's slow, halting, his customary confusion once more considerably deepened, as if he can't understand why she would do such a ridiculous thing. An observation of something he can barely process. And it's not even only that in his voice.

Beneath it, wonder.

She glances up at him and the same is on his face. As always he's found a patch of shadow - or woven one out of thin air - and she can't see the entirety of his features, not clearly. But the bafflement, and the wonder. He's making no attempt to hide either.

She returns her gaze to his hands, reaches for the gauze. Now that she's actually gotten to work on them, they don't horrify her quite so much. They're bad, very, but the core of that horror is that he's voluntarily done this to himself. Now that he's allowing her to take care of them…

It's okay. The sun came up, even if the clouds are between them and it, and he's still here. He's with her.

She can tell him what she feels and she's not afraid.

"You remember what I said when the walkers broke in? Back at the funeral home?"

He's silent a long time. She lets the silence rest between them. She's not going to push him. She knows he remembers this, even if in truth she has no way of knowing anything at all. He's forgotten a lot of things and a lot of things have been taken from him, blown out of him, but she doubts he's lost any part of that evening. He'll have it all. Every second.

In all likelihood, more than she does.

" _I'm not gonna leave you,"_ he breathes. Almost inaudible. The final syllable breaks as soon as it touches the air, and he sounds stunned.

"That's right." She raises her eyes again, and his are waiting for her, dark and huge. She's not certain whether, somewhere in those six hundred miles, he shrank around them or they grew inside him, but they're definitely bigger than they were.

"You said-"

"I'm not. Not again." She takes a long, shaky breath and closes her hands over his. His own breath catches - the torn places are mostly exposed and it must still be painful for him - but he won't care. He doesn't. "I won't, Daryl."

When he pulls his right hand free she doesn't try to stop him; she loosens and keeps his remaining hand enclosed in hers as he traces a single fingertip down her cheek. Out of the lower corner of her eye she sees the deep, angry red of exposed quick and stripped flesh.

He's suffering to touch her.

"I chased the car," he murmurs, and swallows, torn fingertips lingering at the edge of her jaw and leaving cool smears of cream. "Did I tell you that? I don't remember."

A pang lances through her chest. Of course he did. He would. On foot, and he would probably go until he quite literally collapsed. Probably-

"Lost it. The trail. Gave up." His face twists violently, like he's on the verge of tears. But none come. "I'm sorry."

And she gets it all at once from a completely new angle, and it's awful. It's utterly awful. Six hundred fucking miles like he was paying for something. Like his penance. Like punishment.

Hell indeed.

Her throat is locked into a thick knot, breath trapped beneath it, but somehow she chokes out the words. "You found me. You made it."

"I don't belong here."

She doesn't know how to argue with that. So she doesn't. She just kisses him again, and like there was no transition between his eyes closed and open, there's none now - there's intervening space and then none at all. Only his mouth, and his hand clasped in hers, and his fingers sliding through the loose strands of her hair where they gather around the base of her neck.

It's not as deep as it was. He's tentative. He's nervous, and she can tell he's on the verge of shying away, but she doesn't press. She's almost completely still, mouth settled over his - and this time she's the one opening to him when he finally seems to decide something and exhales, cups her jaw and parts her lips with his own.

He's trembling. But so is she.

 _Damn romance novel._

It's not. There's nothing remotely romantic about this. It's probably a terrible, terrible mistake.

The part of her that might have given a fuck about that bled to death months ago in a hospital hallway, was entombed in the trunk of a car, and never made it out.

Never found her.

* * *

He eats. It's awkward with his freshly bandaged hands, and more than once he fumbles the apple, but he keeps hold, and if he's not eating the thing with any particular sign of appetite, it's something. It's not much, but maybe he'll take more later. She eats her own apple and observes him as unobtrusively as she can. He's unquestionably risen out of the gray water and he's making his laborious way back to shore. She doesn't imagine for a second that there's anything very good waiting for him there, but it'll be solid ground under his feet.

Water. He drinks about half of what's there. Then he sits hunched in on himself and gazes down into it as if he can see something at the bottom of the glass, something dimly interesting. He's frowning slightly, and she can sense words fighting through the barriers between his mind and his mouth.

Once again, she's not going to push him. Words are frightening, yet another thing in himself that he doesn't trust. Reach for him and he could spook.

But she's almost the one who spooks when he suddenly extends a bandaged finger and touches the inside of her left wrist.

"How did you know you didn't want to?"

She blinks at him, nonplussed. It's possible that she shouldn't be surprised by this question. It's actually a reasonable one for him to ask, at least regarding the subject matter, given what his mind is like these days. But only now does she realize that except for a few passing thoughts, she hasn't been seriously worried that he would try _that._

Damage himself, clearly. He's more than proved how capable he is of that. But not to that point.

Maybe she's just assumed that if he was going to do it, he already would have. It's not like he hasn't had ample opportunity.

She should answer. She has no idea what the hell to say, but she should say _something._

The truth, maybe.

"I dunno." She gazes down at the thin line slicing across the snaking blue branches of her veins. "I just… I didn't. I cut and I looked at it and I-I didn't want to anymore."

He hasn't withdrawn his hand. He's looking at her intently, as if there's something he needs to see. "Were you scared?"

"Yeah. But that's not why." She falls silent, watching his finger as it trails up and down the scar. With someone else, in another setting, it would be stroking. A caress. That's not what he's doing - he's _studying_ it, like it's a puzzle he needs to solve. "Y'know, I think… I think livin' is a lot scarier."

Immediately, he nods. She can't think of a single reason he would have for disagreement. As far as she can determine, he basically lives in a constant state of varying degrees of terror.

"I don't wanna die," he says softly, and she's just releasing a breath when he speaks again. "But I wanna be dead." He gnaws at his lip. "All the time."

She pulls two words together, on a hiss of escaping air. "I don't understand."

"I don't belong here."

Simple. And nothing else.

She moves because she has no idea what other option to choose. She takes the glass from him and sets it aside, and as she does he pulls his hand back, curling it inward and turning to stare up at the window. His features are drawn into an expression of intense apprehension, as if he's regarding something he badly doesn't want to do but knows he won't be able to avoid forever.

Knows is inevitable.

"You should show me your bike."

It's louder than she means it to be, and the desperation isn't quite successfully hidden. He snaps his head back around at her, startled. But really, it doesn't matter. She doesn't care. If this room is his mind, she has to get him _out_ of it, and as soon as possible for as long as she can. He doesn't have to like the idea, but so long as he isn't actually attacking her, she's perfectly ready to live with that.

Now he's just bewildered. "What?"

"Your bike. The one you were workin' on at Aaron's." She rolls a shoulder, like this is no big deal. "I wanna see it."

He shakes his head, frowning. Unhappy with this. "Ain't mine."

"That's not how he made it sound."

He huffs and looks away, hand distractedly curling and uncurling. As if he's testing it. Making sure it still functions.

"C'mon. Just show it to me." She gives him a small smile she's not certain he can see. Though probably he can. Even if he's not looking at her, he's watching her. "You got somethin' else big goin' on today?"

Still no answer. He closes his eyes and lowers his head, and she feels him sinking into himself - fleeing her. She doubts she's frightened him, but she's tried to herd him into a place he doesn't want to go, and she's seen enough of how he operates now to know that when he isn't resisting with childish stubbornness - or anger - he simply runs. And if she doesn't catch him, he'll get far enough that she won't be able to reach him at all.

"When you were workin' on your old one, back at the prison." She leans in a little, peering at him. "It used to make you happy. I mean… You were doin' a lotta things. Huntin', goin' on runs, pullin' guard duty… But you were really happy then." Her smile returns, and it feels good. It feels true. Because this is. "You used to work on it even when it didn't need it. I'm pretty sure, anyway. You'd just… do it to do it. 'cause you liked it."

Silence for a long time. He's motionless but beneath his skin he's churning, and it's almost visible. It's a multi-party wrestling match with himself, the need to run from her warring with the need to stay with her warring with his relentless despair warring with…

Hope. Has to be. Because nothing else can explain it when at last he raises his head and returns her smile with one of his own. Minuscule. It's very nearly not there at all, and there's a tension around its edges. He's deeply uncomfortable wearing it.

But he's trying.

"You spyin' on me, Greene?"

She breathes a laugh and looks down at her hands. It takes her a few seconds to comprehend the heat in her cheeks and ears, what it is and what it means, and it flutters in her core, and this is beyond ridiculous and beyond fucked up and she can't imagine wanting to stop now. "I… Maybe a little."

For another long moment he doesn't speak again. He gazes at her, head tilted to one side - and not in that eerie animal way but merely thoughtful. Maybe it's her imagination - a swell of wishful thinking - but a very few of the shadows appear to have slipped away from him.

He's brighter.

"Alright." And everything in her leaps about three feet into the air. It's possible she hadn't actually believed he would say that. "I guess… Alright. Yeah."

When she gets to her feet and reaches down he takes her hand - hesitant and careful but he does - and lets her lead him out of the room.


	22. if you could look right through

**Chapter 22: if you could look right through the cracks**

 _Let's not talk about it, let's just not talk. Not because I don't believe it, not because I want it any different, but I'm always saving and you're always owing and I'm tired of asking to settle the debt. Don't bother. You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed. There's only one thing I want, don't make me say it, just get me bandages, I'm bleeding, I'm not just making conversation._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

They're halfway to Aaron and Eric's place when she catches the glances they get from a couple of the people they pass, raised eyebrows and faint concern. She looks down at herself, really looks at him in the full cast of the daylight, abruptly perceives what a fucking wreck they both are and has to bite back laughter.

Not hard laughter, but still. She shouldn't. It would be an unbelievably bad idea. Although he's walking with her - head down and shoulders hunched but he's _here_ \- she can tell his courage is fragile, his grasp on himself just as much, and it wouldn't take a lot to shatter both and send him fleeing back to that poisonous room. Back to the horrors in its shadows, which are at least familiar to him even if they're horrible.

But they _are_ both a wreck. Both of them in clothes from yesterday, clothes they obviously slept in, both of them spotted here and there with blood and her hair somehow even more matted and tangled than his. Her teeth feel fuzzy. His hands are heavily and very noticeably bandaged.

In other words, they're in about the state in which they spent most of those last days together. In fact, she thinks they're doing a little better than that.

At least on the surface.

In any case, it's just like old times.

She must have made some kind of noise, movement, something that acted as a tell, because he looks sharply up and over at her, apprehension and irritation warring for supremacy in the set of his mouth. She understands that she's not totally responsible for either of those emotions. Simply being out here is bothering him a lot. Courage is exactly what it's taking, and also a degree of pain tolerance. Not that his tolerance for pain isn't already inhumanly enormous. Far higher than anyone's ever should be.

"What?"

 _Nothing,_ she almost says, and stops herself just in time. He would know she was brushing him off. He would know it instantly. And while once he would have snorted and/or grunted and/or rolled his eyes at her…

She doubts he would confine his reaction to that now. She doubts he would be able to, even if he tries. Feeling like he's being brushed off, handled, humored, placated - it's clearly a nerve. A raw one.

He is fully aware of how insane he is. It's deeply insulting to him that anyone would suppose he's not, or would pretend he isn't, in the interest of making like everything is _normal._

And it very likely reminds him of when he wasn't insane. When he had everything he's lostz.

So instead she shrugs. If she's not going to placate him, she has to trust him with honesty. Insignificant and otherwise. She can't even be certain of what he'll regard as insignificant and what he'll be overwhelmed by. His world is not the same shape as hers. "We're a mess."

He does grunt then, and _old times_ lands a bittersweet kick in her gut.

"It's not like it's a problem." She shrugs again, tilts her head back and allows herself a few seconds of basking in a sun he probably despises. "It just… I dunno. It reminds me of-"

"How it was," he says, almost inaudible, and she draws a soft breath.

As he's said more than once now, losing his mind hasn't robbed him of his considerable perception. Nor has it done injury to his ability to do basic addition.

"Yeah."

She isn't going to hold his hand. For a whole bunch of reasons, that's something else that doesn't strike her as a good idea, and the fact that she's kissed him - and been kissed _by_ him - multiple times since last night makes no difference there. But she brushes the back of his with hers, bare knuckles against wrapped gauze, and he doesn't shy away.

Green lawns. Swept streets, clean and well-kept houses. White paint and solar panels. Neatness, order, comfort. And him and her, standing out like twin bloody thumbs.

 _I don't belong here._

"Those were good days," she hears herself say, and she didn't mean to say it but maybe that's why it's so incredibly true.

He snorts - it's _him_ \- and shoots her a faint glare. "They were bullshit."

"Not all of 'em. There was some good." She looks down, watches the scuffed toes of her boots as they swing back and forth over the pavement. Scuffed beyond scuffed. Sometimes she can scarcely believe they haven't up and fallen apart. "Pretty sure I even saw you smile once or twice."

He doesn't answer. She lifts her face; he's dropped his own and she can no longer see it. The edge of his jaw. Glimpse of blunt nose. Razor-sharp cheekbone. He's always had a strangely, roughly attractive face, with no one feature fitting any other in a completely comfortable fashion and decades of bad living far too evident in every line. But it also didn't take her long to see the softness behind it when his mouth and eyes relaxed. Months of decent sleep and eating well at the prison filled the softness out, brought it closer to the surface. He was, as she said, happy then.

Now his face is like a weapon. Sharp and blunt. Hard. The softness all beaten down and carved away.

"You set the fire," he says, and something in it drains all her blood into those scuffed boots.

"We set it together." She says it gently, not arguing - reminding. He might remember the night he lost her with perfect clarity, but other things have to be smeared and blurry, fragmentary, gone entirely. But he wasn't speaking as one does when reminiscing, or trying to recover a memory half lost.

His voice was paper-thin. Dry. He was talking like someone remembering a nightmare.

He shakes his head, still staring down with those invisible eyes. "I said you wanna, you said hell yeah." Almost sing-song. Childish. She's never heard him sound like that, and _disturbing_ is inadequate. It occurs to her that this could be a hitherto undiscovered facet of his fractured personality, something with a new set of rules she has to learn. She knows what _multiple personality disorder_ is - or is supposed to be - and she's sure that's not what's happened to him. Every part of himself he's shown her is _him,_ every part connected and keenly aware. He cycles rapidly through them not like minds but like severely delineated moods - an image of a cracked mirror.

Possibly he's desperately looking for something that works. Something with the right set of tools for engaging with the world. But no single one has what he needs, and in the end he's left dizzy and frustrated and scared.

"You're right," she murmurs, because he essentially is.

"You set it," he repeats. "It never stopped. I brought it with me." At last he lifts his head, and when she looks at him she can see the dull gleam of the hooks in his mind. The despair she pushed away for a little while back there - that _he_ pushed away with her help - has returned, and it's tearing slowly at him, doing to him inside what he does to his own hands. "I told Carol, I said _we ain't ashes._ I actually said that." He turns his face away, gazing at the wall in the distance, and that's when she knows.

He hallucinates. Except that might not be exactly correct. He _sees things._

"Is it burnin' now?"

He nods.

"The houses?"

"Everythin'."

"Can you tell me?"

He stops dead. She stops a split second after him. Aaron and Eric's house is the next one down; she hadn't even noticed they were that close. The entire world had shrunk to her and him and his ghosts, and now, as she gazes up at him, _haunted_ is the only word that comes to mind.

No. Not haunted. Haunt _ing._ Once again, she's looking at a wraith, a wraith with eyes full of black fire and hopeless, lonely rage, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but devour itself.

If he can't come to her - or if he can't _stay_ with her _,_ which seems more accurate - she has find a way to go to where he is. If he can't find the strength to reach her, she has to fight her way to him. If he's lost in the dark, she has to abandon the light to be with him, and if last night didn't teach her that, nothing ever will.

"You said… _If I could see._ I can't see it," she says, very soft. "Help me. Tell me what you see."

For a long moment he merely stares at her in utter silence. She's not even certain that he's breathing. She _is_ certain that he's not blinking. More than just about anything else, she wants to look away and she doesn't - locked into a bizarre wrestling match. Not with him.

It's nowhere near that simple.

Suddenly he turns, points at the nearest row of houses. "On fire." He takes a slow breath. "It's huge, the fire. Roof's cavin' in. All splinters. Broken. Fallin'."

 _Jesus._ "What else?"

"There too." He gestures behind them. He waves vaguely at their surroundings. "It's everywhere. Grass. Trees. All one thing. All fire. It's so big."

He's speaking flatly, in something that approaches a stumbling kind of rhythm. Nothing like the sing-song tone of before; the way he releases the syllables makes her think of hammers and axes, bullets, heavy artillery. Impact. Like he's using them to beat at the world.

"People." This time unprompted. "Crawlin'. On the grass. In the street. On fire. Gettin' closer. They ain't got no eyes. No skin. Got too many teeth. They won't stop smilin'."

Not just impact; _relentless,_ as if he's trying to convey the grinding _feel_ of it in the only way he can. And with every word the sun is dimming, the light coming from new and awful places, dancing across his face. He's using very few words, very simple ones, but somehow it's all there in the spaces _between_ the words, everything he's not saying. These are not the dead. What he sees is so much worse. Beings with intelligence. Intent. Beings who can smile at him.

"Who are they?"

He shakes his head. There's something new in how he's looking at her, something about how he's focusing. How he _isn't_ focusing. How his focus has shifted, in a way she can't pin down. Isn't sure she wants to.

"What do they want?"

"To hurt."

"To hurt you?"

Another shake of his head. One, slow. "You."

 _Oh._

But she knew.

"There's one that's real bad." An odd, delicate shiver runs through him, and his eyes flick slightly upward. "Flies. Claws. Razor blades." He swallows. "Close."

She's standing with him in broad daylight, on a street she's walked down well over a hundred times by now. She can hear robins in the trees, the rustle of leaves, voices somewhere, laughter. A faint tinkle of silverware through an open kitchen window. Over his shoulder, a glimpse of two figures she takes for Carl and Enid rounding the corner and gone.

She's standing with him in Hell.

 _Close._

"Where?" But that's another thing she knows before he answers. It falls across his face like a shadow before he speaks - helpless fear and equally helpless sadness, as if he's bearing witness to something awful that he'll never be able to stop.

Should be able to. But he won't.

"Behind you."

* * *

Somehow she gets him out of there.

Not home. No way in hell - _ha -_ is she taking him back to that fucking room; she wasn't going to before and right now if she could somehow keep him out of it for the rest of his life she would. She asked him to show her the bike and fuck it, he is _going to show her the goddamn bike,_ and if she has to walk him through a crowd of demons to do it, she knows he can take it. He took over half a thousand miles of it. He can go a little further.

At any rate, he's not protesting. He's not trying to fight her. He's quiet. Calm. It's a dark calm, like a cloud settled over him and muffling everything about him, but she'll happily take that over explosive anger or despairing paralysis. She takes him by the forearm and leads him toward the house and he goes willingly enough, and she firmly ignores the way he glances back at something only he can see.

It's not there. It can't hurt her. It shouldn't frighten her.

It really shouldn't.

But with every step she can feel herself emerging from it, the place she descended into, and by the time they reach the steps and the front door the sun is bright all around her and whatever shadows are here are confined to him.

Literally. That's how he's following her. Trailing at her feet.

Eric answers the door. Eric knows her - they've all been over for dinner at each other's houses a few times - but has never actually _seen_ Daryl, at least not close up, and he's very bad at hiding his nervousness, his smile poorly forced and his gaze flicking to Daryl's hands and hurriedly away again. Daryl hangs back, says nothing. He would be glowering if there was any malevolence in him at the moment. Instead he merely kind of lurks.

He's every bit as nervous as Eric. Eric is alarming him. Eric is still new to him, and that in itself must be alarming. As far as she knows, Denise is the only person outside of their immediate group who he's spent any significant time with at all.

Yeah, sure. He knows all about the bike. He'll open up the garage door, they can go around. Not letting them in the house; she gets the sense that it's reflex on his part, and the second after he says it he looks like he might be about to take it back, but she nods before he can make the attempt, gives him a smile she doesn't feel - he can probably tell just as well as she can - and turns to head down the walk.

Daryl follows wrapped in his silence. Her thin, hunched shadow.

She's not sure what she'll see. She's been told there's a bike and it's not road-worthy, not intact. Other than that, she doesn't really have any idea. If Daryl has been presented with a task - a potential project, should he want one - she has no idea of its scope. No idea what's actually before him.

So she stops a few feet from the door and looks, and sees what she sees.

He doesn't stop. He moves past her without a glance in her direction, hands swinging loose at his sides, and only halts when he's standing in front of the bulky thing under the tarp.

A little hesitantly, she joins him.

She also knows that the bike was here before, that all these shelves of parts are themselves evidence of a preexisting project cut off in mid-stride, as if left here for someone else to pick up and continue. But she's only partially conscious of the rest of it. She's staring down at the tarp, oddly breathless. As if this is extremely significant.

It is. She couldn't explain why if someone demanded that she do so, but it is.

He curls his bandaged fingers clumsily around a fold of it and pulls it away.

It's not his old bike, and not merely because it's missing more than a few parts. The shape is different, the lines and the angles, the sheen of the metal. It's dirtier somehow, gritty like gravelly earth between her fingertips, and only now does she realize that there was a kind of weird elegance in the one he lost that this one doesn't have.

It feels devoid of pretense. It feels like a thing to be used, and fully aware of the spare simplicity of its use.

She's reading a lot into a pile of metal and grease.

But it's there.

For a few moments neither of them says anything. She might be half waiting to see if he'll crack first. But of course she does in the end, looks up at him. Studies him. "Can you get it runnin'?"

He glances at her - quick, the kind of tense bestial furtiveness she saw in him when he first arrived - and shrugs.

"You were workin' on it already." And he seemed better, then. It wasn't even that long ago. It was the day before fucking _yesterday,_ and it feels like it was weeks. He seemed better, and his hands were unbandaged and he was reading outside. He took a walk with her. He was almost…

Not normal. That's not ever going to happen. He wasn't _normal_ before he got shot in the head; a bullet carving a path through his brain is unlikely to improve that, even in the very long run. No one is normal anymore, bullet or no bullet. Just like no one gets to be all right.

But he was getting better. She thought. Even if he didn't appear to think so.

He shrugs again, gazes down at it. Lifts a hand and transfers his gaze to that, to his fingers as he flexes them. "Can't do it like this."

"So you will when the bandages come off." She manages to pull off the certainty, she's almost sure. She sounds certain in her own ears. She steps away from him and around the side of the bike, examining it. Suddenly she wants to touch it, and that might not be advisable. "Leave 'em on for a couple days, give yourself a chance to heal."

He snorts. A hollow kind of laugh, like this is funny in the bleakest possible way. "They'll come off and I'll fuckin' do it again."

"Maybe you won't." She turns back to him and crosses her arms. He's watching her from beneath his hair, his hands half curled. Fingers twitching very slightly. "It's a couple days from now. You don't know what the hell that's gonna be like. You shouldn't assume it."

"Yeah, well, you're always so goddamn sure." Sullen. Again with the surly childishness above the deeper pain - so familiar she almost can't deal with it. She doesn't uncross her arms. She tries to maintain the composure she managed to scrape together. But inside she's doing all the clenching his hands don't seem capable of, and when she opens her mouth, what comes out belongs to a much younger version of herself.

Younger and also dead.

"I'm sure I shouldn't be sure about everythin' bein' _shit._ "

"You said it wouldn't kill me, havin' faith," he says, and it's bitterly cold. Blunt. He's swinging the words like a club. She sees it coming and she knows there's no time to step out of the way, so she only watches the blow approach, and she thinks _he's going to be so fucking sorry_. "It did."

She just looks at him. She's not going to cry. She doesn't even want to. It might be a mark of something terrible that this particular thing doesn't hurt her the way it should, but the fact is that she considers the girl who said that to him, and she doesn't think a lot more of her than he seems to.

There's admitting the possibility that tomorrow might be bearable. And then there's willful stupidity.

The fact that he's alive now doesn't change the fact that a couple of weeks ago she would have an idiot to believe he was.

She looks at him, and little by little the coldness thaws. Not into warmth. Something in him crumples as that thaw takes hold, and he drops his head, his hands twisting at themselves.

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"I _say_ shit." Head rising, and again he's meeting her gaze, features twisting worse than his hands are. Certainly more painful. It's like last night, in the throes of what seemed to her almost like one long seizure, when he said those things to her and then just about tore himself apart trying to beg her forgiveness. Begging her to stay with him. Begging her not to let him drive her away.

"I know," she repeats, because she does and she wouldn't have even needed Denise to attempt her explanation of why he can't help it, but he rolls right over her.

"I don't _wanna_ say it. I can't stop it. It just comes out. I can't stop anything anymore." He isn't articulating it, but she can see it in his helplessness, what he's remembering. He gave her a taste of this before, the loss of his control. When he takes everything he knows about someone and equips himself with it as an arsenal. When he skips the smaller caliber stuff and goes right for the nukes.

He could be so much worse. He has been.

He will be.

"It's okay," she says softly, and she steps toward him. He doesn't cringe back like she's half expecting him to, and once again when she touches his hand he doesn't yank that away either.

It loosens, and she can curl her own fingers around it.

"I don't wanna hurt you." He speaks to the ground. To her boots. With his eyes squeezed shut like they abruptly are, she can't escape the sense that he's offering it as a kind of prayer. A desperate one. He wouldn't say it like that if he genuinely thought he could ever stop himself. "Why the fuck are you even here?"

 _Because you begged me not to leave._ But that's not why. That's not the core of it. She could say it but she knows it would be like an accusation to him - _you forced me to be here._ Once maybe that would have been true, but she could have left at any time last night. Probably should have. Yet here she is.

 _Because I want to be._

She closes the last of the distance and slides her arms around his waist, and he slumps into her. He's shivering slightly, head drooping until his brow is resting on the ridge of her shoulder, his hands awkward and clumsy against her back. Clumsy because of the bandages, but awkward because he wants to be closer. He _needs_ it, and outside of the worst kind of extremity, when all he's left with is the rawness of his need, his body doesn't know how to let him.

This, also, isn't new. This was always there.

He's never known how to do this part.

"You know why." She turns her head and presses her lips to his temple. She doesn't feel strong. But apparently she can fake it well enough for now. She can hold him up, and maybe she can even hold some of him together. "You know."

* * *

She gets him to show her more. Not a lot more - there actually isn't a whole lot to see unless he wants to start inventorying actual parts - but she gets him talking, even if only in halting monosyllables, and he tells her some of what's missing, what needs installing and repairing and replacing, and he can do it all without looking at her, which seems to make it easier. And it gets easier anyway, as he goes. He's less halting. Less monosyllabic. It's clearly still hard and he's not having anything even vaguely like a good time, but he manages.

He emerges from himself. At least more than he has in a while. Focusing on _things_ for him is neutral ground. Things have no feelings. They have no intentions, good or bad. They can't betray him, and they can't hurt him the way a person can - and will. He loves her, yes; in the end that probably only makes her more terrifying. If he loves her, if she has that part of him…

 _God forbid you ever let anybody get too close._

A thing is just a thing.

At some point he falls silent and merely stands, looking slowly around and blinking as if he's slipping free of a dream. Returning from somewhere else. She moves, quiet shuffle of her boots on the concrete, and he looks sharply at her, obviously startled.

Maybe he actually forgot she was there.

"That's all." He swallows and turns his face away. "Ain't no more."

"Alright." She was on the opposite end of the bike; now she rejoins him and once again she carefully takes his hand. "Thank you."

He rolls an uncomfortable shoulder.

"I think you can. Get it runnin', I mean."

The look he gives her skirts the edge of a scowl. "How the fuck would you know?"

"I know you."

She lifts his hand and cradles it in both of hers. Even in its loose curl beneath the bandages, she can feel the strength. The powerful thickness of his fingers. She still doesn't fully understand why he won't stop attacking this part of himself - though she's noticed scratches and scabs elsewhere before, especially the picked-open place over the scar on his brow - but she wonders if that power might not have something to do with it. What he's allegedly done with that power in those hands. Here in a place where he doesn't have to maim and kill to survive, where no one is trying to maim or kill _him,_ the potential of that power might be something he fears.

 _I don't wanna hurt you._

Fears, on some level, enough to cripple himself.

"I know you," she repeats, and he meets her eyes as she reaches up and pushes the rough curtain of hair back from his face. "I know what you can do."

He shakes his head and she withdraws her hand. "You don't."

"You didn't lose everythin'. I know that too." She pauses and briefly closes her eyes. It's a gentle argument, and increasingly she doesn't feel as if she's debating for a side she doesn't truly believe in, but she's tired of having it now. He's probably tired as well. "C'mon. Should get you to Denise, she has to take a look at that finger."

She's fully expecting him to mutter something about how he's fine, or how his fingers aren't any of that nosy bitch's business, but instead he ducks his head and nods, and he doesn't seem to have anything else to offer in the way of comment.

Given the literal nightmare that was last night, her level of mild surprise regarding how relatively well this is going is rising steadily.

"Let's go."

But he doesn't move. He glances toward the garage door and the sunny world outside with a hard flash of anxiety across his features, and after a couple of seconds she understands the source. Or is pretty confident she does.

Light. And he has no idea how far away Denise is, through a potential obstacle course of strangers and stares like the points of needles. Some of the worst things he can face right now: people and light. He was all right getting here, but they hardly ran into anyone, and it was still mid-morning. Now it has to be noon or a bit after, and even in here she squints as she follows the direction of his gaze.

They didn't bring his pills. _Damn._ She doesn't know if light can be a trigger for his headaches, but she's positive it doesn't make them better.

Well. They're going to Denise.

"We'll stay in the shade," she says gently. "Much as we can. And I know a way around. We shouldn't run into anyone."

When he turns back to her the anxiety hasn't disappeared, but plain gratitude and a healthy dose of relief has covered a lot of it over. Not just that she said it, she suspects, but that he didn't have to say anything at all. He nods again, and while the line of his mouth is too tight to be a smile, she doesn't think it's hugely far distant. She gets it, what he's not saying aloud. His unspoken language, created because the one he was given at birth consistently fails him. Nuanced. Complex.

He'll try.

* * *

Outside.

It shouldn't feel this strange to him. He spent six hundred miles outside. There were barns, houses, shacks, sheds, the carcasses of trucks and cars, but mostly there was Outside, and in it he felt most at home. Walls - walls and their holes, and crouching silent in a corner as the dead seethe past beyond, flow like a tide, and watching the holes in the walls widen and widen as the black pours down to puddle on the floor and the white wriggling things pour with it to swim.

Curled on a cracked linoleum floor and knowing that something was in the room with him. Not seeing, but _knowing_. A blur in the corner of his vision, constant. Almost solid in the seconds before the storm came and cracked his skull open. A spindly thing with a spinning, jittering head.

It did not have his best interests in mind.

(Nothing he sees ever has his best interests in mind. This is because he himself is consistently unsure about what his best interests are. He woke up in the hospital without any kind of solid grip on the concept and that grip has remained absent since, and if his hallucinations are externalized fragments of his broken psyche, they can know nothing he doesn't know. They can have nothing in mind that he doesn't also possess. The closest to the articulation of _best interests_ he has ever been able to come is _SURVIVE_ , and that much is something these monsters have never threatened.)

So Outside was better. In ways. No walls. Exposed on all sides, so no shelter from external storms, brutal sun, freezing and melting, and difficult to hide. But he could run anywhere. He retained the maximum number of options. It was a kind of wretched freedom. And on a cool night, walking under the moon with his belly full and blood crusted on his hands and mouth and following the distant unearthly sound of her voice like a nightbird, it was almost good.

 _Good._ Whatever that meant. He had to relocate all his words, after; the meanings of some of them had reformed and altered and shifted around.

But now there are walls everywhere. Now he has a room, and its walls are full of oozing holes and he's never left alone in there even when he is, but something about it makes him want to stay all the same. Outside is so huge and so bright, and he feels small and frail and tender - like a twig-boned fawn born far too early, crumpled to the ground smeared with blood and trailing afterbirth. The grass itself is sharp and hard enough to cut him. The wind whips his exposed skin. The sun burns and burns and burns. Sooner or later his eyes will melt and run down his cheeks like the tears he doesn't seem to have anymore.

Here he is, though. Her soft little hand on his arm, leading him through the shadows beneath the eaves. Around behind houses, across lawns. To his right, the wall looms high. Over it he can hear the quiet hiss and groan of the dead.

He wonders how many there are out there.

Asks her. She seems surprised; jerks her head up. Seems unsure whether she heard him right. He repeats it. He's patient. He can be as patient as she needs, because her patience is divinely abundant. He can hopelessly attempt to live by her impossible example.

She still doesn't appear to understand the question, though. She frowns; furrows in that lovely brow. That long smooth Martian canal of a scar. How many… What does he mean, _out there?_

The fences. How can he say it, and what makes him want to know? He almost remembers. It happened just now - it was the sound. It was the fences, how many were at the fences, which was too many. Shouting and running between them with poles. Chainlink bending, bowing. Rick with the pigs and his hands blood-slick and shining. It was all about the fences. When the fences went down there was nothing left. When the fences went down they had to run.

They had to go. _Beth._ They had to go.

She's quiet, walking beside him. He doesn't know if he actually said anything, if he got any of it into words. So he waits.

The walls are sturdy. Strong. She's talking slowly, carefully, like she doesn't want to say the wrong thing. Give him the wrong idea, maybe. They're stronger than the fences were. So far it hasn't been a problem, them building up like they did then. But there was a herd, a while ago. Rick had a plan to lead them away. It didn't totally work. Partially, but not all.

A bunch of them came anyway.

And the walls?

Breached. But not because of the herd. There was something else. People. Crazy, breaking their way in and killing everyone they could see. Hacked them up with machetes. It was bad. Didn't lose as many as they might have, but they still lost a few.

Fought them off. Walkers. People. Buried the dead. Got the walls repaired. Moved on, like you do.

He goes to bite his thumb and can't. Forgot. Gauze and tape against his teeth; he drops his hand and tightens his jaw until it hurts, clenches on the inside corner of his mouth until pain and blood flood it with saliva. He swallows both and glances over at the wall again and expects to see it on fire and crumbling, his brain obliging with a vision of what he remains sure is coming, but there's nothing. Featureless in the pounding sun. Standing up just fine.

They _will_ go down. Sooner or later, they will. She knows that. Or she has to.

She looks at him again. It's gotten worse, her essential brilliance, and he can only bear to get a glimpse of her but he's not confident in his ability to read what he sees there. Yeah. Yeah, she knows that. She learned. They all did, the hardest way possible. She hasn't forgotten, and she never will.

 _Mistake_. He whispers it, and it rasps in his throat like the rake of his own jagged nails. He's not angry, saying it, but it's very important that she understand this. She should have learned it too, by now. They can't afford to make it again. It won't save them or this place because nothing can, but they still can't make this mistake, because if you're going to die it's maybe worth something not to die stupid.

It's a mistake, having faith. Holding onto something when the entire world is screaming evidence to the contrary. That anyone can be saved. That anyone ultimately survives. That there are still good people.

Survive however you can for as long as you can. _God, Beth._ Please survive. Please. But don't trick yourself into thinking it means anything. It's… He heard a phrase once, doesn't remember where and it doesn't fucking matter because it fits: _a tale told by an idiot._

We're born and we die and it signifies nothing.

She offers nothing in the way of argument. She's leading him through the shadows and he follows, because what the fuck else is he going to do? Where else is he going to go? Even if he _wanted_ to leave her side. All around him, so completely on the edges that he can hardly see them at all, laughing things gather and crouch and dart through the darker places. He gazes down at the ground and worms slither out of the soil under his boots. But where she steps, they balk. They turn away, squirm elsewhere.

If he stays in her path, he's protected. That's probably a lie, because he knows for a fact that she can't protect him from a goddamn thing, but for how he can believe it. Embrace it. He's no better than those worms, but as long as he walks in her gentle light, he's safe.

Following her in the midst of utter absurdity to the place that can't possibly heal him. But for her, he'll try.

* * *

It's not just Denise.

He stops dead in the doorway, hand on the frame. _She_ doesn't realize that he has; she's saying something, Denise is looking up from a desk-thing close to the wall and turning, and that's all right even if the room is strange and too clean and too bright and smelling of antiseptic to a degree that burns his nose, but there's this _other girl_ and she's _looking at him,_ looking at him like she _knows_ him, and he wants to whirl and claw his way back out. Back to the shadows. Back to that fucking room. Never make the terrible error of leaving it again, no matter what _she_ does.

He trusted her. She said. _Lying bitch._ He shouldn't even be surprised.

She does know him, this girl. He knows her. Not well, but he does. Small, dark hair, slightly wistful face with rounded features. Another name buried in the debris. He gazes helplessly at the pile of ripped, crumpled paper. It took him so long to find the Baby's name; it would take him hours to dig this one out.

He should be pissed off but mostly he's just tired. Always tired. Always.

Except there's the name. Denise saying it, looking at the girl, and something pointed in her tone that he has no idea how to feel about. _Tara._ Asking her to run out, get something, and in that way people ask other people to run out and get something when they just want those people gone. Everyone knows that tone. Polite fiction. Fucking joke, like all politeness, like all fiction.

He doesn't want to feel grateful for this. He doesn't want anyone doing him a fucking _favor._ But _Tara_ \- he has it but five minutes from now he'll have lost it again - is moving toward him, not quite looking at him, meeting his eyes in a brief flicker and sending a brief, tight smile with them as she passes and opens the door and leaves.

Just him and Denise. And _her._

He's expecting to have to say something. He doesn't have to say anything. She's doing it for him, telling Denise about his hands, his finger - at least the one, there might be more - and talking about _antibiotics._ Fucking hell, he survived how many infections out there without antibiotics? It's just a finger. It's not going to kill him. But it hurts, hurts more than he can recall noticing, as if being in close proximity to the possibility of relief has woken it up and set it crying. Like a baby. It throbs, thick and hot, and he looks everywhere but at the two of them.

He doesn't want to feel grateful, no.

But she's taking care of him.

She has to go and be _like this._ She has to go and be good to him. It's unfair.

He steps away from the door and wanders the periphery of the room, pacing, gritting his teeth and everything else and willing her sweet voice into an indistinct warble and Denise's along with it. He drifts into the sheen of it - more than the kitchen - and the brightness, like a tapping finger on the backs of his eyeballs, the shine of the surfaces, stainless steel and glass, examining table and shelves of medical supplies, gauze and tape and pills and sutures and syringes and scissors-

Scissors.

He doesn't know he's stopped until he's stopped. Doesn't know what he's looking at until he's pretty sure he's already been looking at it for a few seconds. It lies there on a steel tray, shine on shine, gleam on gleam. Cold and perfect. Everything else fades into a hard glow as indistinct as the voices, and it's just him and them, staring at each other. Regarding each other across miles and weeks and a shattered lifetime - old enemies now. Blood enemies.

If he had just ripped them out of her hand.

If he had just ripped her fucking hand _off_. Ripped them both off, just to make sure she couldn't try a stunt like that again.

 _If._

He can't feel the cool of them under his fingers, but he can imagine it. Fumbling them into his hand, he can weigh them in the cradle of his palm and imagine their clean swooping form, running his fingertips along them. Along their edge. Their point. Turning them, facing that point down. Into her fucking shoulder - what the hell. What the _hell._ Who the fuck taught her to aim? Saw that much before he didn't see anything else.

It's so bright in the hallway, where he never made it out. Waxed floor. Her hair. Stainless steel. The world bursting in through the hole in his head.

Her eyes. Different kind of shine. Wet on his face.

Face - that sharp point, level now. Closing in. He sees it as an actual point, spatial. Temporal. A _point_ in space-time, where things converge. It has density. It pulls him. He falls into it, plunges. Not screaming; he's not afraid of it. He's just going back to where he should be.

He's just going back where he belongs.

 _Daryl?_

The word and the world are the twinned release of a bowstring and he whirls and snaps his arm sideways and down and she staggers back, a single choked gasp breaking into her as she lifts trembling fingers and gropes for the scissors where they protrude from her shattered glasses lens and from the dripping ruins of her left eye. Looking past her at _her,_ haloed in cruel sun, and he basks in the horror blowing her beautiful eyes wide. It's worth the ruthless hammering of the light, to see that.

 _This is how you do it, you useless little whore._

 _Daryl?_

The word and the world - Denise's hand on his wrist. Gentle. Taking the scissors from him, laying them down. He watches her do this, and he doesn't resist. He's not sure how he would. If he wanted to.

He doesn't.

Her glasses are intact and she has both her eyes. He didn't do it. He studies her for longer than he needs to, just to make sure. She looks back, calm. More and more he's certain that he can't make her be afraid of him, and this should absolutely infuriate him and maybe later it will but right now…

No. No, not right now. Glances across the room at _her_ again. Apprehension there, flitting across her face like the wings of a moth. She saw. Maybe he didn't do it but he knows: she saw what almost happened. Diverging from that spatiotemporal point, a universe in which it _did_ happen. A glimpse. He would have. Surely he would have done it.

He would have. Telling himself.

Like it's something he needs to believe.

Denise's hands still on him, still so gentle. Unwrapping the bandages; it hurts but only distantly. It's back to not mattering. He looks down long enough to see the pus-and-blood wreckage come into view and looks firmly away again. Fucking coward. He should make himself look. He should force himself to look at them for as long as they're exposed. _She_ says he might not do it again but as with everything else _she_ is full of rainbow-colored shit; this is all he'll do, all he _can_ do, and he can't ever let himself forget that. Can't ever let himself forgive. Not for one fucking second.

He doesn't get to come back. He doesn't get to _not_ be this.

This is all he is.


	23. it won't give up, it wants me dead

**Chapter 23: it won't give up, it wants me dead**

You swallowing matches and suddenly I'm yelling _Strike me. Strike anywhere._ I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you've taken something out of me, and I have to search my body for the scars, thinking _Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in?_ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Then _she_ leaves him alone.

Just for a few minutes. She says. Says something about _using the bathroom_ but he doesn't buy it for a fucking second. He watches her head for the inner door and flames lap sensually at the baseboards; she's arranging things so he's alone with Denise, like everyone is always _arranging_ shit with him, putting him where they want him to be with the people they want him to be with and acting like it's all by chance, like it all just happens to be like this, like he isn't being _managed_ , how fucking _dare she,_ and all at once the lapping flames are roaring up the walls and seizing her by the hair and dragging her shrieking back to his waiting teeth, and he squeezes his eyes shut and bites down on his lips, and wrestles breath into his lungs.

He's all right. He can be all right.

He loves her, so he can be all right.

Sitting on the examination table, Denise doing her own bandaging. Looking at his hands, at her - this is what's real. Not that. _This_.

She glances up. Must have known. Felt the tension, heard the change in his breathing; he's not trying to hide how fucked up he is. With her, he knows there's no point. Not that he ever really attempts to hide it, but with her he thinks he doesn't have to bother with even the bare minimum. He's already shown her some of the worst he can without actually _showing_ her.

And here she is, wrapping up his hands.

Kind of nice, how when you've expressed a desire to murder someone with those very bare hands, it lends its own perverse brand of comfort with them.

She took the scissors from him. She was soft with him. If she was going to run from him in terror, she would have by now.

She's talking to him. He's not sure when she started but now she is. He listens, because why the fuck not, and she says, cutting off a strip of bandage, that it's really good to see him here. Good to see him out of that house.

 _Good to see him._

It can't have been easy. Cutting another strip. She's not looking him in the face now, not meeting his eyes, but he doesn't mistake this for avoidance. She could. This might be a kind of mercy but it's also utility. She's finishing up her work. He can respect that.

But she's also saying _it can't have been easy,_ like she's _congratulating_ him or something, he should get some kind of gold star for going the fuck outside and walking less than half a mile, and as she turns his hand he feels his lips pulling into a pathetically satisfying sneer.

The fuck does _she_ know about it?

She does look up then, her hands ceasing their movements. Looks at him for what feels like a long time. Looks at him with the early afternoon sun catching her glasses and ricocheting into his eyes in a way he can't take. He looks away and down and poison churns in his gut as thunder growls in the back of his head, and he hates every one of those six words. Every single one that he couldn't stop, and didn't want to.

It doesn't actually make him feel better, hurting people. Trying to. Not anymore. Not that it ever did.

 _I know._

She goes back to the bandages.

She was going to be a doctor. She's speaking very casually, like none of this is any big deal - and to him it feels like for her, it may not be. She may not be _managing_ him at all. She might really just be talking. He shifts his gaze back to her and her bent head and it's bearable to watch her and the edges of her features as she says that she was going to be a doctor - flash of a wry little smile - a _real_ doctor, you know? But it didn't work out.

Why?

His voice. He has no idea why he asked it. No idea why he gives a shit.

Shrug. Stress. Anxiety. Med school sucks. It ruins you as a person. Quick glance up, another equally quick smile - no pretense. Very small but the warmth is genuine, he's _certain,_ and he cringes back from it, bewildered. But he also doesn't move and she's looking down again. Does he know what a panic attack is?

Yeah. Sort of.

She had them, a lot. Too much. So she switched to psychiatry.

Because she wanted to understand why she was so fucked up? It could come out in a sneer, sharply mocking and intending to sting, but it doesn't. He listens to himself and hears honest curiosity. It makes sense to him that this might be motivation. He was shit at school, and his broken brain is stupid now, but if he could do something like that, if he was smart enough, if it was an _option,_ he thinks maybe he might want to.

Though he already understands more about why he's so fucked up than he would frankly prefer.

(He has always known that he was _fucked up._ He has always known that he wasn't well. He was being called _dumb_ and _stupid_ and _retarded_ from his earliest memories, the unquestioned evaluations carelessly slung at him and often without any particular malice, but he was still very young when he began to comprehend that it ran deeper than that. Deeper than they knew. He could never have explained what was wrong with him, could never have hoped to put it into words, and in that life before, he didn't actually understand the _why_ of it, but he knew that he _was._ He was wrong inside, in a multitude of ways. Plagued by nightmares. Frightened of people. Frightened of everything. Unable to focus, except at specific times in specific places. Tormented by details but desperate to keep them, as if their retention could save him. Sometimes filled with the distinct sensation of being outside himself, of being apart and separate, watching himself bleeding and sobbing, or watching himself running panicked and hopeless though the trees, or watching himself doing nothing at all. And so angry that he wanted to kill the world.)

(He was all wrong inside even then and later he wondered what those partially responsible would have done if they knew. If they would even have cared.)

(He does not believe they would have.)

Was that why she switched to it?

Shrug. Partially. Isn't everyone fucked up? Maybe she also wanted to help people. She never really thought too hard about it, about why. It just felt right.

He listens to this and flexes his left hand as she finishes up with it. It's gleaming and greasy with antibiotic ointment, the scabs softened. They pull but don't crack. It's ugly but it's not as ugly as it was, and he doesn't want to be relieved, doesn't want to feel better about it because he doesn't deserve to, because he's a sick piece of shit who imagined stabbing this woman through the eye with a pair of scissors, but too fucking bad.

He does feel better.

Not everyone is fucked up the same.

No. She presses a strip of tape in place. That's very true. Everyone is different. And when it comes to severity, well. If that's a contest, some people are clearly in the lead.

She's talking about him. Growl, but it's weary. He was also talking about himself but that doesn't matter; she's talking about _him_ and she can just come out and fucking _say_ that, Christ, say that he's fucked up instead of tiptoeing around it like everyone else is doing, once again she's been with him long enough to have seen some of the worst he can show anyone right now and even _that_ isn't close to the worst he's capable of, he's so fucked up and he always will be and she knows it, she _knows it, just fucking_ say _it, you bitch._

Red around the edges. Shifting shadows in the corners. He's panting, heaving breath, and she sits back with her surprisingly deft hands loose between her knees and looks at him with hideously patient eyes and waits.

Is he done?

Blinks at her. Is he done with _what?_

With that little episode. She pauses long enough for him to try to break in - no fucking idea with what but if he snarls enough something will come out - but she doesn't give him a chance to actually do it. _Yeah, Daryl, you're really fucked up. I wish I could tell you something else, but you're clearly smart enough to know it. You get it. I won't lie to you. You are seriously, majorly fucked up._

Another pause. This time he doesn't even attempt to fill it. He just stares at her. Stares as she finishes taping the last of the bandage and stares at her hands when she releases his. She doesn't slide her chair back like he's sure she will, though. She remains, gazing evenly at him.

 _I wish I could tell you I know how to_ un _fuck you, too. But I don't. I have no idea. I think it can happen, but I'm stuck trying to figure it out as I go._

Well. Okay. But then _her_ breaking through his already fractured concentration, because she's been looking for - or in - the _bathroom_ for a long time now, and _Beth,_ what-

 _She's not in the bathroom, Daryl._ Again, tone that completely shuts him up. Words to match. This mousy little woman he should be able to squash like a fucking big. _Or if she is, she's not in there for any of the reasons you usually go there. You know why she's there. Why she left in the first place._

He doesn't answer. Doesn't need to. Because yes; he knows. And he's not sure why he feels so suddenly chagrined - not about the explosion but about something else - but he does.

Flicker of movement; he yanks his hand back and away from her approaching fingers but not before she makes grazing contact. She doesn't chase. Keeps her hand there, outstretched, as if she's ready for him to return to her. As if she _expects_ him to.

The shadows seethe. No crawling spider-things. No razor blades or clouds of flies. Just shadows, swirling like black mist. Around her, yes. But they're also keeping a distance.

What he's doing to his hands. He does that because he feels like he has to, doesn't he? Because it feels bad when he doesn't. Maybe like something squirming around in his gut or under his skin, someone tying him in knots. Maybe it gets hard to breathe. It hurts when he does it, yeah, a lot, but some part of him does feel better. Feels like it's _where it belongs._ So he wants to stop. But he also doesn't want to. He wants to do it all the time.

 _That's right, isn't it?_

He gapes at her. Hands forgotten. Everything forgotten. Even the shadows - and the light now pulsing gently at the edges of his vision.

How the fuck does she _know that?_

Because it's not that uncommon. He has it bad, but plenty of people have less severe forms of it. Wry little smile. Or had. Probably that population has been kind of cut into since the world ended. Maybe more than a lot of others. She's not so sure people like her do so well out there. Outside the walls.

Hoarse: But he does. Did.

If he wants to call that _doing well,_ sure. She guesses.

 _Fuck you._ Hiss, thin. Anemic. He wishes he could put more behind it but he still feels like she smacked him in the face with his own hands. It never occurred to him that anyone would _get that_. Would have the words for it, or something close. But she doesn't get it. Doesn't fucking _get it._ All soft and heavy and slow, yeah, she'd last about five minutes. She has that much right. She'd get gutted like a hog and left to turn. She has no _idea_ what the fuck it's like out there. She has no idea what the fuck _doing well_ consists of. It's not soft beds and three squares a day, you stupid cow. He was doing well out there. He was doing _fine. Peachy._

Is he okay?

No. No, he's not okay. He is not fucking okay. He's _fucked up,_ she said, but also the light is so bright all of a sudden and he shrinks away, putting a hand up to block it, and somehow it's not enough, like his flesh isn't sufficiently opaque. Not just light; shimmering at the edges of his vision. Rainbows warping and arcing. Spider-fingered lightning.

Thunder.

 _Oh God._

He's dimly aware of her moving. Curling in on himself, clumsily gripping the sides of his head, maybe moaning aloud _please don't be a bad one please please_ but it's going to be, he can tell, and as it roars toward him he's not in the dim perverse safety of his room in his nest. He has no defense against it. He's a naked helpless insect pinned under a magnifying glass wielded by a laughing child.

Turning, managing a bleary glance upward. Enormous eye hovering over him. Slice of a nose. A wide, cruelly cheerful grin. He knows that face. Knows it so well. Saw it like this so many times. It's the worst, the absolute worst fucking part of _everything_ now, and he whimpers and squeezes his eyes shut, dropping sideways onto the examination table on his elbows and trying to cover his head with his wretchedly inadequate hands.

 _Merle. Merle, Christ, please. Please stop it._

 _It's just a fuckin' bug, leave it alone._

Voice. _Her._ Door opening, feet across the floor, her boots. An exclamation. Denise, saying something, calm but tight. Then hands on him, attempting to lift him, and he's trying to twist away because he needs the dark and if they pry his hands away from his face he won't have even the tiny pathetic scraps of it he can gather to himself. But _she's_ saying something about _medication_ and that's the sweetest word he ever heard, even the _possibility_ of relief, so he lets them pull him upright and he clenches his jaw against the pulsing light.

Not from the window. Him. Inside his head. Ferocious and whipping him like a solar wind with every beat of his diseased heart. This is what he means when he says _he wants to be dead:_ when you're dead it _stops._ Dying is merely a means to an end, and it's ugly and brutal and even if _he's_ ugly and brutal some stubborn part of himself refuses to give in to it. But the end that it's a means to… Yes. Dark and silence and no feeling. Nothing.

That would be very good. That would be a step up in general.

Except _she_ wouldn't be there, waiting for him.

* * *

 _Yet._

* * *

But medication. Someone pressing tablets past his lips, rim of a cup. Water. He gulps and every swallow threatens to blow his head apart. More tugging; they're trying to get him on his feet and he lets them, struggles with them, because Denise is saying something about a bed and even more importantly _dark_ and that might be even better than _medication._ Yes, she can lead him anywhere if she's leading him somewhere dark.

Merle above him, laughing. Laughing with a chorus of wide skinless bleeding mouths. Merle laughing with his mouth full of ripped flesh, milky eyes empty. Staring at him and lurching to his feet like _you know what you have to do now, little brother._

 _All that time I spent tryin' to make a man of you. Now let's see how much of a man you really are. Let's see, you snivelin' pussy. You get those scissors and you come at ol' Merle and we'll see which one of us goes down._

He didn't want to remember this. God, he didn't. Buried under rubble; it should have stayed that way. Not clawing its way out to grin at him.

Her hands on his face. He's stumbling but they have him. They both do. Third voice, worried, blur of dark hair - _Tara, Jesus, can you get the door_ \- and he's leaning on two strong shoulders and staggering into cool sweet _heavenly_ dimness. Maybe the thunder muffles.

Maybe Merle's face blurs away. Some.

No idea how much further. There could be stairs; _up_ and _down_ feel like academic concepts at best. Direction in general seems to be only applicable in certain places at certain times. He's arrived in a region of suspension and he can't depend on any of it anymore.

Except her. There's her.

There's them.

He barely knows _Tara_ but she's rushing to get the next door for him, and he feels a pathetic and hateful desire to thank her. Bites down hard on his own cheek to suppress it, and then harder because the hot pulse of pain there distracts him for a few seconds from the deep blinding hammering against the walls of his skull. He has no idea whether he's actually making any noise, how much, but _she_ is still talking to him with that voice like music, and he followed it for six hundred miles and he can follow it a little further.

Dimmer. Someone says _curtains_ and it's dimmer still. Indistinct glimpse of a small room, uneven shapes of furniture, something he identifies as a bed just as he's lowered onto it. Boots fumbled off; he slumps and doesn't try to stop it. They can do what they want to him. He doesn't care.

But he also isn't worried. Not about them. About her.

They're helping him turn. Helping him lie down. In the doorway, Merle stands with his skull and brow a churned pinkish mess and a ragged forearm in his hands, chowing down like it's a fucking fried turkey leg. Strings of flesh between his teeth, blood pattering on the floor. Hellish amiability. He lifts a gory hand and waves at the bed.

 _Just you and me, brother. Soon as these bitches fuck off - Doctor Dyke and that fine little teenage dream of yours. Soon as they get their asses outta here, you and me're gonna have some catchin' up to do._

 _Been way too long. Thought you forgot all about me. Thought maybe I tumbled right outta your head when it exploded. Splattered right out onto the fuckin' wall with the rest of those sad excuses for brains you had in you._

 _Well. I'm gonna remind you. I'm gonna remind you nice and hard._

He doesn't want to see that. Fuck, _fuck,_ he didn't want to remember and he doesn't want to see but he can't stop it; even when he closes his eyes he sees it like his eyelids are translucent membranes, the wings of a fly. The world is narrowing to a throbbing screeching corridor of excruciating light and Merle is there at the end of it, starting to walk, coming toward him with all the slow inexorability of continental drift and all the thunderous speed of an oncoming train.

 _Go away._ Hum between his ears, in his throat - is he saying it? The shape of the words on his tongue and against his lips. The forms, the rounded and opening flow. _Go away. Go awaygoawaygoaway GET THE FUCK AWAY_

Shoving himself up, trying to scramble backward. Shoulders hitting pillows, headboard, wall. Kicking at the covers. Clawing at them, at the hands on him, trying to beat them off. Thin shivers of pain all up through his fingers and arms lost under the crushing weight of the rest of it. He can't breathe. They're yelling, groping at him, but they can't _see_ and they won't help him, no one will, he's alone, he's alone like he always is in the end, curled naked and screaming under the light as it burns him alive, Merle bounding onto the bed and crouching over his chest and gripping his jaw, wrenching it down, vomiting rotten meat into his mouth.

Tiny needle prick in his arm, like a single star breaking through the dark, and he's drowning.

He's drowning in silence. Dark. The star is gone. Everything is going away. Gone.

Yes. This is what he wanted.

Everything stops.

* * *

She doesn't sit. She senses Denise wants her to, with a hand on her upper arm, but Denise can wait. Beth is going to stand here and watch him for a few moments more, watch him continue to loosen, his body splayed in mid-spasm and his head lolled to the side. More than looseness. He's going limp.

So then she does turn away. Because she can't see that. The essential absence of muscle tension, like life slipping away.

Not again.

It's only then that she realizes she's shaking. She's shaking hard, her teeth practically chattering, but she's aware of these things only from a distance, as if the needle went into her as well as him and she merely got a lesser dose of the sedative. Enough to numb her.

If only.

The bedroom is very dim with the curtains drawn. Spare room, when this building was being used for something other than a clinic, and accordingly spare, but there's a bed, and that's enough. She doesn't really see anything else, except the shadowy outlines of Denise's face, the gleam of her glasses.

"You okay?"

Beth rolls a shoulder, and Denise keeps going.

"Right. Shit, stupid question. I'm sorry. God." She releases a hard breath, and while Beth can't see her eyes clearly, she can feel Denise's gaze flicking past her to the bed and to the man sprawled across it. "I didn't know they were that bad. He didn't tell me. No one told me."

Beth presses her fingertips against her eyes until light bursts open behind them. Echoes of him, maybe. "It was almost that bad last night. Went on for hours."

"It-" The snap in Denise's attention is palpable. More things are palpable, in this room, than should be. "Seriously?What the _hell?_ Why didn't someone come _get me?_ "

Beth looks helplessly at her. How the fuck to answer that? How to explain what it was like, seeing it? Watching? Knowing that she couldn't help him, that she couldn't make it _stop?_ And it wasn't just that. It was how he would have felt, someone else _seeing_ him in that state. Like seeing him stripped naked. Hideous weakness. And a desperate, vicious flood of bile.

"I couldn't leave him," she whispers.

"No one else knew it was happening?"

She shakes her head. Swallows, closes her eyes again. "He was quiet. Mostly."

"Jesus," Denise breathes again, and says nothing else for a short while. They stand there, watching him without watching him, in a deeply uncomfortable liminal space with a hand on an arm and an abyss between, and Beth can't stop thinking about how horribly _good_ it felt to lean into Rick's side, so warm and solid, and cry.

"My mom had migraines sometimes," she says, very soft. She's looking at him again. It's almost impossible but she's managing it. The boneless curve of his hands. The odd angle at which his head has fallen, tangled strands of hair in his eyes and against his cheek. She can do it because she can see his chest rising and falling, and the rhythm is steady and deep. "But they weren't like this."

Denise's voice, when she speaks, is strangely and discomfittingly hard. "These aren't just migraines. They wouldn't be _just migraines_ anyway, but it's not even that. You were here. He was seeing something. He wasn't only in pain, he was terrified." She releases a laugh that's more like a dry croak. "And earlier I was talking to him about _panic attacks._ "

"I keep thinkin' I can help him." As if she didn't hear Denise at all. She did - but it also sort of doesn't matter. She steps forward, toward the bed. Slow. "I keep thinkin' he's gettin' better. Then shit like this happens."

Standing beside him and staring down at his hand lying palm-up on the mattress, fore and middle finger barely curled at all and the last two hooked closer, the slight arch of his thumb. She loves his hands. She can admit that now and it's easy. She loves them as much as she loves every other part of him - their simple, inelegant strength, the way callouses that should have been rough always felt so oddly smooth, the pale and almost delicate scars scattered across his knuckles. She knew them better than she ever expected to, before he died. She lay in the hospital those nights alone and imagined them in hers, hers in his, clasped. Warm. Safe. Holding those hands again. She would. She would make it out and she would, and she wouldn't let them go.

Now she's watching him destroy them. And he can't stop. And he doesn't even really want to.

She leans down and lays a fingertip against his open palm. His hand twitches very slightly, like a barely interested Venus flytrap, and goes still.

"I've thought maybe this is worse." Saying it. Saying it aloud. After this, she won't be able to take it back. But it's not as if he wouldn't wholeheartedly agree. "Him, like this. Maybe it would've… Maybe it would've been better if it had killed him. Maybe it would've been..." She drags in a shuddering breath, but her eyes are dry. "Kinder."

Denise, quiet: "Do you think he would try to finish it?"

"I dunno." _No._ The answer should be no. She was pretty certain.

But that was before.

"I don't know either. I don't know how dangerous he is. If he's dangerous. Hell, no. No _if_." Another dry laugh. "He is. He definitely is."

That reaches her. Grabs. Beth jerks her head around, mouth tight. She had almost lost sight of this part of it. Of how none of this is decided. Of how this is all still _probationary._ "Did you tell Deanna that?"

Denise meets her gaze steadily. "You think he'd be here if I had?"

Beth studies her for a long moment, what she can see in the gloom. Daryl murmurs something; at least he doesn't sound distressed. But she was hoping he wouldn't dream. She was hoping he would just be _gone_. "Rick wouldn't let that happen."

"You think I don't know that, too?" Denise inclines her head at the bed, and all at once hot sharpness is jabbing through every word. "Shit, you think I don't know how ugly that'd be? Him, Rick, Deanna… He's a bomb waiting to go off in about five separate ways, and they aren't even all just about him. I can't tell you how _pissed_ that makes me." She pauses, jaw working. Beth has thought of her as a soft person, nervous, and the fact that she's proven strong under fire hasn't done much to change that. But that's not what she's seeing now. "He should be in a hospital. A real hospital - I think he'd have a pretty good chance then. He should have doctors. Real therapy, actual medication. Not people playing tug-of-war with him. Not _this._ This is _bullshit._ "

She stops, glances up and abruptly looks faintly sheepish. "Sorry. I didn't mean you were… I'm sorry."

"You care about him," Beth says softly. It's not exactly a revelation. But it is, this way. This is something else she didn't know about. A side of this she wasn't seeing.

Both of them staring at each other now, as if for the first time discovering each other's existence.

Denise half shrugs. "He's my patient. I guess." She hesitates. "And he's your…"

Open question, there for her to answer. She regards it wearily. It was only yesterday. She said it yesterday, said it aloud like the uglier truth she just said, tasted his mouth, and she actually dared to hope it might make things _simpler._ Better.

"I dunno." She ducks her head and rakes a hand through her hair. "I don't know what this is."

"Oh." And suddenly it's a whole new kind of awkward. But it's not like she cares. It's not like awkwardness matters in the face of this, and she senses that Denise is right there with her in that respect.

So that's something.

"I'll get you some water," Denise says after another moment or two, and Beth takes this for what it is: an exit point. She nods and doesn't look up. Hears footsteps, the door close.

Then the fall of silence and shadows.

She sinks onto the bed like she's been waiting to do it, because she has. Toes off her boots and shifts closer beside him, and she tries - as gently as she can - to rearrange him. Straighten his legs and his arms, turn his head to a less awkward angle. Sweep the hair back from his face. What light there is catches the scabbed crater-scar on his brow and her throat knots up, and she tips her head forward against his temple and splays her hand on his chest. Feels the thud of his heart, the rise of his sternum - life. So much. He's brimming with life. _Overflowing_ with it. There's so much life in him that a bullet to the head couldn't blow it all out. So much life that nothing between Atlanta and this bed could kill him.

She whispers his name into the shadows. They're gathering in, closing around them. As if he's drawing them in his sleep. Making a blanket of them, for her and him.

He came back. He's right here.

He made it.

It's not better.


	24. there's no escape from this

**Chapter 24: there's no escape from this, my new consciousness**

 _Give me bullet power. Give me power over angels. Even when you're standing up you look like you're lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary, like it's just another petty theft?_ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She has the gun.

She has the gun and she's where Dawn was, and even besides that she's been in this hallway before. Been here exactly this way, everything motionless in that bizarre crooked light like a movie in freeze-frame, everyone around her silent and faceless. They're blank in every way. Empty. They have no reason for being here other than to watch it all happen with their nonexistent eyes.

Only _he_ is wearing his face.

It's upturned as he kneels filthy and haggard before her, clinging to her legs with ruined hands and arms trembling with exhaustion, everything in him trembling in the same way for the same reason. He has nothing left and he's in so much pain, features wrenched with it, twisted into a permanent grimace as agony crashes over and over into his broken brain like hurricane waves. Beneath and mixing with the pain is weary terror. He's huddled, trying to hide from the light and this small faceless crowd, seeking shelter in her because she's all he has.

Except he's not looking for shelter anymore. Not like that.

She doesn't have the gun after all. Not yet. It's lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood, the source of which she can't see - and she doesn't need to. He gropes for it and fumbles it into his grip; it's slippery and he nearly drops it as he raises it by the barrel and offers it to her with a shaking hand.

The crooked light is hardening him even as it slowly shatters him from the inside out. He's brittle. He's going to fall apart and it's going to be horrible beyond imagining when he does. And he might see to it that he doesn't fall alone.

Offering the gun. Staring up at her, pleading. His lips don't move but she hears his voice in her head all the same, ragged and hoarse and very clear.

 _Please. I don't want to be like this anymore. I want it to stop. I want to get better._

 _Make me better._

She can. She can do this for him. She can't do anything else, but she's strong enough to do what he's asking, what he's begging her to do. She should cry at this, at what's going to happen now and all over again, but she's not and she won't as she accepts the gun from him. Her eyes are clear, and even though she doesn't need her inhuman aim it's available to her. That steel trap in her that squeezes the trigger when it snaps shut.

She's not crying because this is okay. This is how it's supposed to be. He doesn't belong. He's trapped.

She can free him.

With one hand she smooths his hair back from his face. With the other she gently presses the muzzle against his brow. He closes his eyes, and he's smiling.

 _I love you._

She doesn't know which one of them says it. Then it doesn't matter.

He'll never say anything again.

* * *

Eyes open in the dimness.

For a few seconds she's not sure where she is. Unfamiliar bed, unfamiliar room - the _feel_ of it far more than what little she can see. It's smaller, more spartan, and the light isn't only dim but _wrong._

She blinks. Late afternoon light. It's very quiet.

She's not alone.

She blinks again, focuses on the dark form facing her and half blocking the light from the curtained window. The form blinks back - flicker of distant reflection. Eyes lost in a face equally lost in shadow. She thinks of owls and cats and wolves. Dusk predators and night stalkers with pale green-gold coins for retinas.

He's awake, and he's lying on his side and watching her.

For how long?

She swallows, and as her hands whisper-shift on the cheap bedspread she hears the louder whisper of his own and sees his bandaged fingers curled against the darkness of his body. All of him is curled, no part of him touching her, but his gaze is like a single enormous hand touching all of her at once, and with total nightmare logic she's abruptly certain that he's going to lunge in and rip her lips off with his teeth.

Of course he's not going to do that. Of course he's not. He draws a shaky breath and the memory snaps into focus so sharp it hurts like a paper cut: his headache that was so much worse than any _headache,_ getting him out of there and into this room, his groans and then his terrified screams, Denise with the gleam of the needle between her fingers and then watching him go mercifully limp.

Wishing she'd had access to that before. It's horrible, but it would have been good to have in reserve. Good for him. Easier. He slept then, and she's under no illusions about it. She knows Denise did him a profound kindness.

She doesn't understand what she's woken into, but she won't be afraid of him now. She refuses. She raises a hand and touches the side of his cheek, and he jerks into a shudder like she's jabbed him with a cattle prod.

Doesn't pull away.

"Daryl?"

It's all she can think to say.

If anything, he's drawing himself in closer. But he's alert. Present. He isn't taking his mind with him. She hears the almost inaudible sound of him licking his lips, the slope of his shoulder and side rolling as he breathes. It feels like an hour passes before he speaks, and during that time she can feel it building in him, gathering beneath his surface like magma. Like the pressure of steam. When it escapes it comes in a hoarse, ragged whisper, a single word.

"Where?"

"The clinic." As quiet as him but much softer. "Well. Kinda." Her fingertips move again, stroke across the sharp jut of his cheekbone. "You had a headache."

Not just a headache. And he knows it. Though somehow she's certain he won't be angry with her calling it that - not this time. He won't see it as her sugarcoating anything for any benefit of his.

He nods. "Fast." Another trembling inhalation. "Bad."

"Really bad. She… She had to sedate you."

"Needle." Another nod. He shifts again, turns his head and appears to make an effort to see over his shoulder. The window. The dim and dying light. "I didn't dream." He turns back, and she can hear a thin, humorless smile in his voice. "Should get that shit all the time."

She doesn't respond. There isn't much to say.

Her hand hasn't left him and it lifts and cautiously begins to cover more territory. His temple, his brow. His hair. She strokes him, smooth and unhurried, and his eyes slip closed as his trembling eases. "You doin' any better?"

 _No._ No, he never is. But he burrows further into the pillow - though she doesn't get the feeling he's trying to escape from her - and sighs deeply. "Storm's over."

 _Storm._

He's never described it to her. He's never really talked to her about it at all if it comes to that, other than to acknowledge that it happens. But he says _storm_ and she thinks _of course._ It was like that, both times. Distant thunder closing fast, and then the skies opened up with a whipcrack gust and emptied buckets of pain, and there was nowhere he could find any shelter. He was soaked in it, wind tearing at him and thunder pummeling his body from the inside out, lightning spiking through his nerves. One of those summer storms that slams through and hurls the world into itself in fistfuls like an angry toddler, then blows itself away just as abruptly as it came.

It's like that inside him. Like staring at thunderheads in the distance and knowing they're coming, and nothing can stop them, and her gut clenches itself into a slippery fist.

But _the storm is over._ He's calm now.

"We tried to help you. You were…" She hesitates. Lying here with him in the gathering dusk might not be the best time or place to broach this subject, but then again there probably isn't any _good_ time. There's no such thing anymore. It's not a luxury either of them have. "You were scared of somethin'. Seemed like you were _seein'_ somethin'."

"Merle," he breathes, and that fist clenches until bands of pain ripple through her middle. She thought maybe it was those monsters. Maybe fire. Something else. She wishes it had been. Somehow so many other terrible things wouldn't feel bad in quite this way.

And she doesn't even know what exactly he saw.

"Merle's dead." Instantly she knows it was at best a useless thing to say and at worst that it might send the situation cascading into a place from which she won't be able to recover, but all he does is give her yet another nod.

"I killed him."

She shakes her head, her fingers traveling down the curve of his skull. She doesn't know the details here - she thinks only Rick and Carol might know exactly what happened - but she knows the basics. "He was dead when you got there."

"No. I killed him. It was me." Twitch at the corner of his mouth; that smile again. She doesn't like it at all, and she likes it even less when he lifts his own hand and lays it against the side of her throat, tape and bandages rough against her skin, thumb gliding up the ridge of her jaw. "Sooner or later I kill everyone."

Almost sing-song again.

It's not right. What she woke up with isn't right. Part of her wants to shove him away, and she hates it, and a tiny part of her hates _him_ for being this way now, for the loss of the man she spent the night holding, and that's the most terrible, because it's the most utterly unfair.

"He was a walker." There's something pitiless in her voice now. A cold edge. Yes, it was fucking awful. More than she even knows. Doesn't mean she's going to let him make it worse. "You put him down. You did him a favor. You did what we _all_ do for each other."

"He was trapped," Daryl says softly. "Freed him."

"Yeah." But she's heard those words. Or heard someone talk about hearing them. Against her will but not for anything like the first time, she thinks of his mad eyes and his bloody hands and a carved red W marking his brow. And she feels the weight of his hand as she closes her own lightly around his wrist.

"You free someone by stabbing their goddamn brain out?" Coolly musing. As if he's curious about her opinion regarding some philosophical conundrum. " _Out._ Got it on my fingers. It was pink. Part of his fuckin' face was gone. Mush. I did that. You think that _freed_ him?"

"I don't know what the fuck you want me to say."

Her own honesty shuts her up faster and harder than anything he could have said. It shuts him up too, and the silence slams down between them like a steel door, far harder and denser than the mere absence of words. Some of the time with him she's tried to think of things to say, some of the time she's felt like she succeeded in finding almost the right ones, and a lot of the time she's been at a loss, but she hasn't said _this._

Not like this. Not with this weary impatience, no attempt whatsoever to hide it.

She doesn't think he's playing a game with her. Not even a bullet would do that to him. Maybe his fascination - his _love_ \- might be mutilated into something twisted and dangerous, but that's a far cry from the introduction of an entirely new part of him. He doesn't _manipulate_. Not the way most people think when they hear the word.

He's not playing a game, no. But she's still beginning to feel toyed with. As if something inside him is batting her around like a cat with a little stuffed cloth mouse, seeing how she rolls and tumbles. How much force it takes to send her flying how far.

He withdraws his hand. He does it suddenly; it's there, warm and heavy with his thumb beneath her chin, and then it's gone, only the ghost of that warmth left behind. On her skin and in the air just above.

"You don't gotta say nothin'."

"I know I don't. But you want me to." Maybe he's pulled his touch back but her own hasn't left him, strands of his hair wound around her fingers. She tugs, and part of her considers what it would be like to _yank._ "And I don't know. I don't fuckin' _know._ What to say. I wanna help you. I want you to stop _punishin'_ me for wantin' to help you. Seein' you like that, like you- like you were…" She doesn't know what to say but all at once the words are coming in a torrent, and she gazes at the dim, looming form of him and the dimming light behind and she lets it come. "You were like this… Worse than last night. It hurt so bad. All I wanted was to make it _stop,_ Daryl. God, I just wanted to make it fuckin' _stop_. And I didn't. Denise did that. I stood there like an idiot and I watched her do it for me. I couldn't do _anythin'._ "

Watched him go down. Watched him on the floor, bleeding out. Watched him die and watched him carried out and watched the lid close on him and couldn't do anything.

Couldn't ever do anything.

"Beth-"

She registers that he's spoken, registers the crack in his voice, and keeps on going, tears that she will _not_ fucking shed frozen into an icicle spike in her throat. She wants to stop. She wants to and she can't - can't do that either. Christ, _what a useless little bitch._

" _Nothin'_ I do is right. I keep fuckin' it up. Every time I think I've done something good for you, it gets worse. I'm tryin' to _believe_ and part of me is thinkin' it's bullshit but I'm still _tryin'_ , because it's like you're here but you're not, you're so fuckin' far away, and if I have to lose you again, I swear to _God_ , Daryl, I'm gonna-"

He cuts off the next word with his mouth sealed over hers.

It's clumsy, not well aimed in the near-dark, catching her off-center before it slides into place and he presses her lips apart. _Forces_ them. He went from shuddering and terrified to _this,_ his hand finding the side of her throat again as his entire body shifts itself forward to hers, clumsy as the kiss itself. She opens to it with a low moan and he echoes it, cupping her jaw to angle her to the side so he can kiss her even deeper, and he tastes like blood and metal and that quality she could never in a hundred years define but which she recognizes as pure and unadulterated insanity.

She wanted to prevent the cascade beyond recovery. But she's falling now.

This is crazy. She's just as crazy for doing this as he is. More than crazy; she feels his teeth scrape her skin and he's dragging her in with him, hauling her through a door she didn't know was there and into _his_ world, and with his body burning into hers she suddenly sees it all. The Zone on fire and crawling eyeless corpses and something grinning with its razor blade teeth as it stalks her, and she imagines it standing at the foot of the bed and watching them as he slides a leg between hers and lifts himself over and on top of her - watching them with that bleeding razor grin and its head cocked like his was that night she saw him in the center of the street. Watching them as flies swirl around it, and it lowers a rusty clawed hand and palms its unseen erection.

Whisper: _That's what's really going to have you._

 _Just warming you up. Getting you ready for it._

She doesn't know what to say. Most of the time she has no idea what the fuck to do. And this is too fast and all wrong and it _is_ a nightmare because _she can't do anything_ \- she should be scrambling out from under him and tearing for the door and down the stairs, and she should be able to do this through the numbness of her horror. She sure as _hell_ shouldn't be moaning even louder, opening her legs and canting her hips up as heated blood floods so wet into her cunt, and she thinks, oh _shit,_ she thinks…

This madman could fuck her. This man sick with terror and hate and rage who lives with demons and endless fire… He could fuck her. And she would spread herself wide and take him.

Creak, and everything breaks.

Footsteps on the stairs outside; the door isn't completely closed. She stiffens at the same time he does, and then it's as though some unseen will descends between them and parts them in a single violent jerk, sending them rolling to opposite ends of the bed. He's still staring at her, breathing hard, and she can hear her own panting beneath his, feel hot shuddering in him that matches her own as the mattress conducts it like an electric current.

This is _bad_. This is so fucking bad.

 _Why?_

Because he's _like this._ Because he woke up like this. Because maybe he'll go back to how he was, sweet and sad and needing her even through his hideous anger, but that won't last. This is in him. Getting stronger, maybe.

Maybe she's feeding it.

Denise is softly pushing the door open. Beth sits slowly up, signaling consciousness, and Denise halts in the doorway and nods. "You guys okay?"

 _Fuck no._

"Think we're as okay as we're gonna get." Beth scrubs a hand over her face, shoots Daryl a glance. He's lying there and looking back at her, his eyes lightless pits. Unblinking. "I guess we should probably get outta here."

"It's after seven-thirty. Should at least go get yourself some dinner." Beth can make out the apologetic expression as it sweeps across Denise's features. "I'd feed you, but." She shrugs.

"Yeah. Right. We should." Beth lays a hand on Daryl's shoulder and he stirs, as if he's only just coming awake. Beth is unsure about whether it's an act or not. It may very well not be. He's far more given to acting than outright manipulation, but pre-Grady, he was never very good at that either.

He's good at hiding. He's a fucking pro at that. She supposes he's had to be.

He is now both worse and far better at it than she's ever seen.

The heat is fading by the time they start down the stairs - him once again trailing like her silent shadow - and when they reach the door it's taken on the other less tangible quality of a nightmare, and not even an especially recent or vivid one. His mouth on hers, that happened - but by this time she's becoming acquainted with his taste. His body, its weight - she's held him before. Many times by now. She knows how he fits against her.

The rest of it…

She was asleep for a while. Could be she dreamed all kinds of things.

Could be.

 _Don't be stupid._

 _Stupid gets you killed._

* * *

Through the dusk, they walk home side by side without speaking. He appears to be moving mostly without pain, his bandaged hands swinging at his sides. One of them is curled loosely around a small bottle of pills - a full course of antibiotics. Thankfully that's one thing they aren't running low on, not yet, but he'll be aware of the finite supply, of the fact that he needs them now because of something he did to himself, and she's sure it'll gnaw at him. Make him feel like shit in a whole new way.

And nothing she could tell him would possibly make any difference.

The rest of it… It rears its head when they stop in the center of the street between their houses and he gazes down at her with the black holes of his eyes, each pierced through with a glittering point like a single star.

He knows. She's certain. He knows at least some of what she was thinking. Spread out under him, gasping. Wanting. _What_ she was beginning to want. How crazy it was in the most literal sense.

How she looks at him now and the heat flares back into something that's been dead inside her since he died in that hallway.

 _I don't know what the fuck you want me to say._

"G'night," she whispers, because it's all she has. She should kiss him again, maybe, but every quality of his body - every set of his bones, the ways his muscles overtwine them, his working jaw - is telling her in no uncertain terms that she shouldn't. She's taken some unbelievably stupid risks and they should stop right here and right now. She thinks she cracked something open in him, and the _best case_ scenario is that he merely has no idea what to do with it.

 _He has no idea what to do with it?_ He? _As if she has her shit together? Imagining that_ thing _watching them and fucking_ getting off on it?

 _It wasn't the only one. You were. You know you were._

"G'night," he echoes softly, and something about the near-mimicry in his tone is unsettling all over again. He's still not all there. He's still not _all_ _right._

Nothing she can do now. Maybe in the daylight things will once again have shifted. She can hope.

"I'll see you tomorrow."

Because she will. One way or another, she will.

He nods. The house behind him is al lit up, the last of the light seeping out of the sky and the moon not yet risen, and it's impossible to make out his features with any clarity. The street is deserted. He's a black silhouette, a man-shaped void, and she would swear the air drifting to her from him is cold.

She needs to go the fuck to bed, close her eyes, and not think about this for a few blessed hours.

"I love you," he breathes, and she draws a sharp breath of her own. Not mimicry - if he even had anything to mimic. His head tilted very slightly to one side, his night-predator gaze locked onto her, and so many things are in those three words, and if before they had been choked with an awful combination of sweetness and despair, now all of them feel like a set of claws stroking down her spine.

She should whirl and get into her house as quickly as she can without running. She actually had the _idiocy_ to think this might make some things easier.

"I love you too," she manages - strained - but then he's turning and melting into the darkness. Even in the blazing light from his house, he's doing it - what he always does. Finding the shadows and gathering them around himself. Cloaked.

She waits until she sees the rectangle of light come into being as he opens the door, his shape filling it, and it thins to a line and is gone.

Except that cold patch in the air remains. Not her imagination. It's not.

Or the line between _real_ and _imaginary_ doesn't count for a lot these days.

She inhales deep, pulls it into herself. Cradles it in her lungs, dry as bone. When she climbs her own steps to her door, she's carrying a piece of his night with her. After, when she's eaten and dodged a few half-hearted questions from Maggie and washed up and climbed into bed, she lies there and feels it resting inside her, sitting heavy like a stone. Sinking into her belly.

Heating in her like she's a furnace. Like someone is here with her, stoking the coals.

She turns onto her side - _flips,_ the movement aimlessly angry. The heat snaps into hatred - of today, of the dark, of _wanting,_ how she's lost so many nights to him and she just keeps losing them, and she yanks at the sheets and squeezes her thighs together and bares her teeth like a snarling dog.

Kissing him so gently in his room, in that surreal, nightmarish light. _Everything_ around them was a nightmare then too, but she managed to carve a piece out of it and fit the two of them into the space it left, something self-contained where the horror couldn't touch them. She kissed him and it fixed nothing, solved nothing, but it was still right.

It was all right.

 _I love you._

Only last night. Twenty-four hours from that to this. _I love you._ Now she's tossing in an empty bed that feels far too large for her and expanding every second, the world receding into the dark on all sides and leaving only a trackless desert of tangled sheets. She'll get lost in them. She'll never find her way back.

Fuck that. She's already lost. Got lost on the road. Never made it.

She opens her eyes and the moon slams into her, so bright it hurts, and she goes still and gazes unblinking into it and thinks of him walking beneath it, nothing but skin and muscle and teeth like one of the demons in his visions, mouth and hands smeared with fresh blood. Walking and listening for her song, and watching the forests burn beneath the purity of the moonlight.

Coming for her. He was inexorable. Unstoppable. Night after night she lay awake in this bed and she had no idea that he was hurtling at her in slow motion like a bullet fired from a gun six hundred miles away.

She drags in a shuddering breath and tries to swallow. Tries to lick her lips. She's so dry.

No. She's not.

She squeezes her thighs again and moans, buries her face in the pillow. Hiding from that light, from everything. She's just tired. She just needs to sleep. The last twenty-four hours have been drenched in insanity and she's exhausted, and whatever few hours of unconsciousness she stole curled against his side in that narrow bed sure as hell don't count. She needs to stop _thinking,_ and she needs to not _dream._

 _But._ But he's still there. Across the street, he's there, and that street isn't much wider than the bed was.

There's nothing stopping him.

Walking from Atlanta. Walking to her with the patient relentlessness of obsession. Possession. Standing in the center of the street and gazing at her with his fingers twitching and his head cocked like a curious animal. Standing at her window, hand pressed flat against the glass. Watching her. Sitting on the porch, his fingertips on her face and those hell-light eyes boring into hers. _They took you away from me._

She raises her head and he's standing at the foot of her bed now, curious bestial head-tilt. Eyes glittering like an oil spill. _No one's ever gonna do that again, Beth. You remember how it was. You remember how it could've been. Had you all to myself._

 _The things we coulda done._

 _Things I coulda done to you._

Knife-edge flash of it. Flash of her jammed against the headboard with her legs spread so wide her hamstrings are practically tearing loose, the man she saw in that cell with his insane eyes and his dirty rags and his _filth,_ stench of blood and decay and madness mingling with the deep, strong smell of her soaked cunt, grinning at her with his entire hand thrusting inside her. The sucking gurgle as he does it, her juices pouring out of her. His jagged nails hooked and scratching into her walls. Clawing.

 _Ripping her apart from the inside out and howling like a wolf as she screams._

She wrenches herself up and out of bed so fast and so sudden that her feet push the rug forward and make it skid and she goes down on her ass with a thud and a soft cry of pain, and then she's frozen, splayed with her palms stinging on the hardwood and her tailbone pumping a bruise all the way up her spinal column-

And between her legs.

Listening for anything. Stirring outside the door. Running feet. Her name called, Maggie's voice tight with alarm.

Nothing. The house is quiet. Sleeping.

She swallows and leans back against the side of the bed, slides her knees together and rakes her fingers into her hair and pulls until her eyes water. She was dreaming. She didn't want to, not again, and she did and look what happened. All the shit churning around in her brain, it really shouldn't be surprising how bad it was.

God, though, it's not worse than killing him again. No fucking way.

She focuses on each breath until she's sure she can do it at something approaching a normal pace, and more substantially than the thin, shallow panting from before. She didn't wake anyone up, dodged a bullet - _ha_ \- and she's not going to risk another shot. She's going to get on her feet and go to the dresser and take the last of the Klonopin Denise gave her. Then she's going to collapse, and if she dreams and it's worse, hopefully she'll be too stoned to make any noise over it.

Her entire body sends a groan lurching through her throat as she turns over and around - God, she feels like she's bruised _everywhere_ \- and there he is, crouched on the bed and bending over her, one brightly hungry eye visible through his hair and his lips twisted into a bloody smile.

She blinks and he's gone.

 _Fuck this._

She jams her knuckles against her eyeballs until her retinas explode in purple and green fireworks. Fuck this. This is bullshit. Her brain has been her worst enemy since Grady and no way was that ever going to stop now. There's still sweetness in him, gentleness, so much of it. It hasn't been killed. She saw it when he wiped her tears away with his thumb and told her not to cry. When he swore he would never hurt her and was so clearly terrified by the very idea that he might. When he looked at her with that beautiful, sad smile and told her he had nothing to give her, and he wanted to.

 _I just wanted to get you that damn dog._

It could have been so different if he hadn't.

She gets up. She takes the Klonopin. She goes back to bed and lies on her side and stares at the window. She gets drowsy and the world recedes again, leaving her alone in her desert bed, but hours later sleep hasn't come for her.

Not like he did.

 _Not like he will._

* * *

Sitting crosslegged in the moonlight, looking up. Bathing in it. It was, for a long time, the only bathing he did, and it felt like more than enough. Pale light so cleansing, washing all the color out of him and making his skin obsidian and quartz. Bone and blood. Didn't matter what he did; the moon always accepted him. Forgave. Not that there was anything to forgive. Not that it was possible. There's no such thing as sin in Hell.

Out there alone on the road were the first nights he began to understand that he was free. And it was terrible.

He killed a lot of people after that.

Now not killing. Sitting in his nest with the blankets gathered comfortably around him and looking at the moon, and thinking about _her_. She was always connected but not equivalent. She was not the same.

She was so much more.

 _Wasn't always a moon, but when there was you._

He's naked. He was never naked under that moon and he hates being naked now with his protruding ribs and knobs of bone and knots of muscle, his scarred and patchy skin. But for some reason not entirely clear to him he's stripped and he's allowing himself to bathe in the light, bathe fully, streaming all over him like cool milk from the breast of the world. Hell is a mother and she cares for her children. She saw him this far.

To _her_.

God, he loves her. He's pounding with it, harder and louder than his heartbeat. It's thrumming under his skin, beating at him like it wants to escape. Wants to _do_ something. So _hot_ , consuming his marrow in rhythmic surges like the swells of a storm. He loves her and he finally told her, and impossibly, despite his sickness and his filth, she loves him. He would do anything for her, _anything_ just to keep her with him. Keep her with him in the dark. She can hold him when it hurts so bad and he can't make it stop. She can lie down with him when he wants to be calm and still. She can stroke his hair and sing to him, and when he wants to he can kiss her and be inside her, feel the warm wet of her mouth and the curl of her tongue against his, the way the heat of her skin joins his own. He weaves with her like fingers.

Raw and torn open. Both of them. Taken apart. Consuming. Filling. He'll be inside her and she'll be inside him and it won't stop, and it'll be so perfect.

Streaks of shadow down the walls. In the corner, the sack lies motionless. He can make it be quiet. He can make it go away. She gave him that and that's only part of why he feels the way he does now, like his heart is wrapped in live sparking wire. That current running all through him, tingling in his nipples and his fingertips and his elbows, his knees. Muscles of his belly.

Throbbing jut of his cock.

(After he woke up in the hospital, it was a long time before he had an erection again. When it finally happened, he didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it. He was distracted at the time. Slicing open someone's carotid artery with a scalpel does take some degree of concentration. This is the first time he has truly noticed it. This is the first time he has truly considered what it might mean.)

He doesn't take his eyes off the moon as he curls a hand around his shaft and simply holds himself, pulls in a long breath that shakes at the ends as though he's been crying.

He hasn't, of course. And he also hasn't taken off the bandages. He's been good.

He's _not_ good, but he's been pretending. For her.

Now for her he'll grip his cock and clench his fist until precome drips over his knuckles, until he's whimpering with the pain. He'll crush himself. All for her. Because he loves her so much and all he wants to do is show her, but he has nothing to offer. He has nothing to give her.

Except. _Maybe_.

Yes.

Behind him, silent, the sack gives a single violent twitch.


	25. but the needle's already in my eye

**Chapter 25: but the needle's already in my eye**

Denise again.

She's there in the morning, late morning, coming through the front hall and into the living room and almost colliding with him in the hall beyond. No one is in evidence but someone must have let her in. Not like it matters in any practical sense. He understands now that no one is going to protect him from her.

She totters back, flustered, adjusting her glasses and apologizing. Staring down at her in the slate-gray light falling through the windows - cloudy today and probably rain. The lack of direct sun is a mercy and he's glad of it. No more headaches since that last. Not even the distant threat of one. Except once early, a flutter of lightning behind his retinas, and he touched the pinprick on his upper arm where he knows the needle went in and it went away. As if a trace of the drug lingers there and he released it like fluid from a lanced boil. It worked. It worked better than anything else he's tried.

He wondered if it might be possible to get more.

And looking at her now, he wonders if he should thank her. His finger feels better. Swelling is down, already. Not as red, not as much pus. Doesn't change the facts. She's a nosy mousy little bitch, soft and slow, who wouldn't last a day out there. At most.

But she's done right by him.

Better than he deserves.

He asks her what she wants. Not as sharp as he might have. He doesn't want to be sharp, and for once maybe not wanting to is enough to make him not. Asks her, and she takes another step back and when she meets his gaze he can see that yet again, she's not afraid of him.

It's possible that he should give up on trying to make her so. Could be she's too stupid.

Could be.

Says she wanted to see how he was doing. After yesterday-

He's fine.

That's a tremendous fucking lie, a lie so full of itself and ballooned outward that its skin is stretched thin and must be nearly transparent. He's fine, and he leans against the wall and crosses his arms and peers at her through his hair. Thought he had her figured out. He's not so sure now, and he doesn't like that very much.

(He never felt like he understood things easily. On some level he also always knew that wasn't entirely true; he's sharply observant, can think on his toes, can react both instinctively and intelligently and can read a situation seconds after he enters it. He knows these things because he's still alive, which is the most powerful piece of empirical evidence he could have. He can also read people, always could, and this too was a survival skill learned and honed nearly from birth. Yet he has never been able to shed the feeling that he struggles with understanding, that many things remain beyond his reach. At best it's annoying. At worst it's infuriating. At times it's humiliating. And now either the world has lost a lot of its sense or he's lost a lot of his ability to dig the sense out, and it's all much worse, and the humiliation and the fury are like dark things moving beneath the oil-slick surface of his mind.)

No headache?

Shoulder-roll. No. He does want to tell her to fuck off but he doesn't want that as badly as he did.

That's good. She cocks her head, thoughtful. Two things are almost certainly triggering them, his headaches. Stress - clearly that's a big one, and he snorts, because a life with a minimal amount of _stress_ is something the existence of which he highly doubts and he sure as shit isn't about to get one now - and light. Probably the light is the bigger problem.

She keeps hitting targets he didn't know were there. She keeps _getting it,_ and it's making him uncomfortable, being seen that clearly. Grasped. He blinks at her, clenches a fist and looks away. Scabs pulling beneath the bandages, throbbing pressure on his infected finger. The pain is focusing. Centering. Pain is solid and consistent and he can stand on it, even if he hates it, which was true a long time before the bullet.

That's right, isn't it? The sun was bright yesterday, and he was outside. That had to be stressful. Maybe it hurt his eyes?

Rounds on her, teeth bared. But there's not a lot of force behind it. Confusion. He doesn't want her to see it, though she almost certainly does and almost certainly has. He _is_ confused, all the time, but this is worse. Worse than Rick. Rick feels _obligated._ Rick is nursing his own guilt and looking for someone to pat his head and tell him it's all okay and he's not a failure and he's not a totally worthless excuse for a human being. Rick has a reason to _want_ something from him.

What the fuck does _she_ want?

Why is she doing this?

She sighs. Doesn't answer for a moment. He stands there like a fucking idiot and feels the heat rise up the column of his spine, licking at his ribcage, exciting the worms that nest in his heart. They wriggle and blossom an urge to shiver. She's marble, and he might be able to scorch her but he's not so sure she'll burn.

He could just throw her against the wall a couple of times. He could break her glasses inward, into her eyes. Imagining doing it doesn't make him feel very good so he stops.

Tries to stop.

 _I don't want to be like this anymore._

She's a doctor. She shrugs. Well. She's the closest thing this place has. Closest thing _she_ has. Doctors help people. That's why she wanted to be one.

He didn't ask for her help.

He said that before, yes. _I don't care, Daryl. I think maybe it shouldn't be up to you._

Hotter. Darker. Closing in on him like crushing hands. She must be able to see what she's doing to him. She must also be able to tell that he doesn't _want_ this, he doesn't want to _feel_ this way. Part of him dragging itself free and whirling on himself, pleading: why is he making this so difficult? He keeps saying he wants to get better. What the fuck does that even mean?

 _What the fuck does that even mean?_

He's not in his right mind. Literally, he's not. His decision-making faculties aren't exactly at their best. His choices haven't been good ones. _If the world hadn't ended and everything, you'd be in a hospital, and it probably wouldn't be your idea. That's the kind of shape you're in._

 _You told me to just say it? Okay, fine. You should be in a psych ward and you shouldn't be allowed to leave. You want everyone to think you're dangerous? Yeah, you probably are. At least some of the time. If Deanna knew the whole picture, she would kick your ass through the gates inside five minutes._

He was not expecting this.

She's showed signs of it, this kind of backbone. She's not the only one. He pushes; he pulls, yanks, drags. Interactions with other people are always adversarial. They're trying to get something. He's trying to get something. Both trying to keep from giving things away. But now people are pushing him in a new way, and he has no idea how to define it. What they intend.

Not to _fix him._ Not like he thought.

Denise would not be standing here and telling him he should be locked up if she merely wanted to make his brain all nice and neat and pretty to be in.

So why the fuck doesn't Deanna know?

Because Rick would lose it and burn this place down. Which of course he knew. Maybe didn't completely know he knew, but she says it and it's obvious like a smack in the face. _Rick._ Christ, Rick. Rick is a wrench who hurls himself into every machine he can find. A world without Rick Grimes in it wouldn't be massively easier to be in but it sure as hell wouldn't be any more of a hassle.

So she's trying to avoid a petty little civil war? That's nice.

That's not most of why, though.

Sigh. Impatient on top of the confusion. He's been tossed onto all his wrong feet; he hasn't had any _right_ ones in a long time. Walking wore them all out like old shoes and now he's malformed beyond broken, and his skeleton is weary of supporting itself. Why, then? Spit it the fuck out.

 _I like you._

That takes him a while.

When the fuck did anyone last _say_ that to him? For some reason that's what he can't get past. Someone must have, once. He's been alive - in some form or another - for almost forty years; _someone_ in all that time must have said these three words in this specific arrangement, and delivered them in his direction. It must have happened.

But Christ, he can't remember a single time.

Even _I love you_ might be easier.

Possibly he didn't hear her right. For now the world is calm and quiet around him, no screams or flames or insects pouring through holes in the walls and floor, but his brain delivers false information in all kinds of other ways. It isn't trustworthy. It's far more reasonable that she would say something else.

What?

 _I said I like you._

Okay.

Approximately ten seconds carve themselves out of the rest of the flow of time, and in those ten seconds he's furious enough to fucking kill her. Because how _dare_ she. How _dare_ she say that to him, throw something at him for which he has no defense, a disease for which he has no antibodies. He could hit her, beat her until her teeth rattle onto the floor in streams of blood. Her fucking mouth. Teach it to produce shit like that.

Teach her to _like him._

Then those seconds have passed and he's simply staring at her again.

 _Why?_

The smile she gives him is very small and kind of sad, and he doesn't want to look at it. It pinches at something just beneath his collarbones. Then she answers him and it gets worse.

 _You kinda remind me of someone._ Pause. Slight frown. _Or maybe you would have. Before this shit happened to you. You used to be a good guy._

Grits his teeth so hard his eyes pulse. _Stop._

 _No. You were. I think you still are. You're fucked up, but trust me, that doesn't mean you aren't good. I don't want Deanna to kick you out. Do you want that?_

Won't look at her. Looks down at the hardwood, at the grain, the long rich honey-tinted lines, eggshell baseboards. The narrow grille of a heating vent. Something rustles behind that white grille. Scuttles. Something with way too many legs.

They're in the walls.

 _What?_

Jerks his head up, his eyes abruptly wide. Wide enough to hurt, air too dry on them, and they're already so dry all the time. Could shove her away. Shout at her. Tell her to get the fuck out. Should do that, because fuck her, because if she _likes him_ that just means she's both stupider and crazier than he is, and like he needs _that_ in his life when it's already going so well.

But her voice was soft, and she's not afraid of him.

This place is clean. New. Not one of those old houses full of gaps and cracks and holes. Right?

Yes. This whole place is new construction. Did someone tell him why? Why it's here at all?

Ignores her. Pushes on. If he's going to say this he's going to fucking _say it,_ and he's going to say it before something else can jump in and stop him, make him _want_ to stop. Make him bad. He's beginning to see this moment for what it is, for what they've _all_ been, those times he's been able to stop hurting so much and being so angry, and he doesn't want to lose it, and he knows he will.

Always does.

So he doesn't have much time.

This place, outside, everything behind the walls, it looks new and it looks so clean, but that's a lie. There's something else underneath. Inside. No one else sees it. He does. It's waiting. It's waiting like a thing sleeping in a sack, and sooner or later something is going to wake it up and it'll stir and stretch and emerge like a sleepy bear from hibernation, and it'll be _hungry._

In the walls. There's things here in the walls. Watching. Points to the vent. Yes, he knows they aren't _really there._ But they are. Does she get it? Does she see?

He tried to make Beth see. He's not sure it worked but he tried so hard.

 _Beth._

Her name is a blinding sun-flare and he almost falls.

Yes. Calm. Gentle. Not placating him. He's certain. He's not being humored. It's not like that, and relief blooms in him so intensely vivid that it feels like it's twisting him apart from the gut outward. Unlacing his nerves. She thinks she gets it. Maybe not totally. She'd like to.

He thinks this place is a lie, doesn't he?

A single leg through the grille, covered in spiny hairs. Crooked and ridged. Flicker of antennae. Yes. He does, because it fucking is.

Okay.

She touches his arm and he jumps, stumbles back, and for a few seconds the world splits in half and in one half he's knocking her to the floor and straddling her, grabbing her by the hair and slamming her head into that honey-tinted hardwood until it's stained red, and in the other he whirls and runs. Doesn't know where. Doesn't matter. He just _runs,_ runs and runs until he's gone, because he can't do this.

He's not strong enough to do this.

He stands at the crossroads. Doesn't take either turn. She's lowered her hand but she's close enough for him to feel her body heat like an aura, the way she displaces reality to make room for herself in it. Most of the time, he doesn't feel solid enough to do that anymore.

Doesn't feel like he belongs.

Can he come talk to her?

Fuck. Why. Why does she.

Just a little while. Pause. Gaze direct behind the faint sheen of those glasses. He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to, but she'd like it if he did. Maybe it might even be good for him.

Laughs. It's acid in his throat like the afterbirth of a long session of vomiting. _Good for him._ That's hilarious. Does she have any more like that?

Might. _C'mon. It's not gonna kill you._

No. No, that already happened.

(As far as he's concerned, he never did truly survive. He didn't make it. He died in that hallway, on that floor. The existence into which he woke is not life. He's not a man or a walker but something hopelessly lost between.)

(He died once. He can't in good conscience discount the possibility that it won't happen again. He can't in good conscience discount the possibility that he doesn't get to die anymore.)

(He hasn't yet tested this hypothesis.)

That already happened. So. Stares down at his bare feet, ragged hems of his jeans. His toenails are too long and for some reason that bothers him.

What does she want to talk to him about?

 _Tell me about Beth._

* * *

Tell her about Beth.

Sitting on the back porch, cigarette trembling between his fingers, knees drawn up close to his chest as he picks clumsily at one of those ragged hems. She sits opposite him and two steps down, and for that he's grateful, and the gratitude doesn't make him feel sick. She's leaning against the bars of the railing and looking up at him, and he watches her from the periphery of his vision, smoke forming a softly curling curtain between himself and the rest of everything.

Why the hell does she want to know about _her?_

Beth seems important. She's important to him. More than the others. Different, anyway.

Cold edge jerks upward inside him, a sudden addition to his framework, and he snaps his focus directly at her with his eyes narrowed and his jaw working. Does she think he and Beth are _together?_

Silent. Gazing at him. Studying. He bristles and it's yet another thing he doesn't want to do, and he howls in wretched frustration and slams his fists against the inside of his skull. Trying to crack the crack already there. Trying to widen.

Does she think he and Beth are _fucking?_

 _Are you?_

Looking at the end of the cigarette is easiest. The slow ebb and flow of the coal's being is soothing almost the way the pain is. He could use it to attack his own hands again, maybe his forearms or his face, and that would be a distraction, but it remains within the realm of the merely possible. So far it isn't entering the land of the _actual,_ from which there is no return.

No. They aren't.

Sitting in his nest under the moon, cock in his hand. So hard and so _hungry_ and when he squeezed himself to the point of pain it felt so good he shivered with it.

He clenches his eyes shut.

 _So tell me about her._

What the fuck does he say?

What _can_ he say? What has he ever said? To himself, streams of obscene rapture. Love that bleeds, peels back like blackened skin and reveals flesh glistening pink like wet rose quartz. He hates those things, could never say them aloud, and he can't stop saying them inside.

That she's a weak little cunt. That she's a stupid whore, she's useless and she's pathetic and she should have died, he should have tied her to a tree and left her for walker bait, she only ever dragged him down and he should have abandoned her the first chance he got. That she got him fucking killed, that she did something inexplicably idiotic and he responded in kind, and that's why he's broken and he'll never be whole again. That she left him like he should have left her, left him to rot in the trunk of a fucking car, and even _then_ she wouldn't let him be; she sang to him, sang him out of the dark and sang him through days of agony and humiliation and nights of blind terror, sang him through murder and bloodflow and out through the hospital doors and into the streets of Atlanta and all the jagged roads that ever followed. That her sweet, poisonous voice dragged him north through a trackless hellscape where the dead tree gave no shelter and far from giving him relief the crickets screamed in his ears, and when he finally reached her he couldn't summon the strength to do what he should have done from the beginning, should _always_ have done, maybe should have done the moment he met her and would have if he had only known what she would do to him, and slit her fucking throat.

Gone into the bathroom with her and made sure she finished the job. Got it right.

Evil heartless bitch, he hates her so much. He hates her and he _wants_ her and he hates that even more and he hates himself for it, _take_ her with all that hate and _show_ her, hack her head off and slash his own carotid open, bind himself to her with barbed wire and burn them both alive, fuck her mouth with the barrel of a gun and then fuck his own. Brains spattered like bloody come.

He could. He could. Other things. He.

He.

The cigarette dropped from between his fingers. He doesn't remember when it happened. Missed it. He's watching it smolder to nothing on the white painted wood, burning a tiny dark spot like a storm on the surface of a pale sun. Like a hole in a vast sheet of ice.

Pulls his knees tighter against his chest and shudders.

 _I don't want to be like this anymore._

He wants to get better. He does.

 _Tell me about Beth._

That she's light. That she's all light, all the light that ever was, and her light is kind. It doesn't burn him. It doesn't blind him or sear his flesh, doesn't blister. Doesn't bring the storm in his head. It illuminates his darkness and drives his shadows away. That she's sweet, that she's always been so much sweeter to him than he ever deserved, that her mercy is unfathomable and her grace is ineffable, and it was her kind light that guided him north and nothing else ever could have. That she's generous enough to allow him to touch her, that she stays with him when she should turn tail and run as fast and as far as she can, that she forgives him his weakness and his endless failures, his fundamental worthlessness, his sickness and his disease and the way he infects everything he touches - except her, she must be immune to him, because otherwise she would never let him get near her. That she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. That she's everything, she's the foundations of the world. She's the only reason he has even this kind of half-life, and if she told him to he would drop to his knees and crawl all the way back to Atlanta and then all the way back here to press his cracked lips to her feet.

That she loves him and he can't begin to understand how that's possible, but he believes that she does. That he loves her, and he didn't know what love _meant_ until he began to do so.

That if it's possible for him to die again, and she desired it, he would die in a state of perfect bliss.

The cigarette has gone out.

 _Tell me about Beth._

Alright.

They lived in the same place. Were friends, kind of. Not really. Knew her. Knew she was all right. Seemed like a nice girl. Not the kind of girl he ever would have said more than two words to in the world before, but that was before, after all.

Place fell apart. Never mind how, it just did. Everyone was scattered. Probably dead. When he ran, he ran with her, because she was the only one left.

So they were together for a while. It was bad. He was an asshole. She was kind of a bitch. Not that much, but they probably deserved each other some of the time. He was worse but that goes without saying.

Things got better. He doesn't totally remember how. There was a drink, and a game, and a fire. Running and the moon. He doesn't know why those things should lead to _better_ but he remembers that they did. Almost good. Not hungry anymore. Not scared or fighting all the time. And he was thinking _maybe_ and he doesn't remember what _maybe_ meant except that maybe _maybe_ meant anything and everything.

Maybe. For one night he was full of _maybe._ It was.

It could have been.

Then it wasn't.

He found her. She did a stupid thing that he still doesn't understand, but it doesn't matter. He stepped between her and a bullet, and she lived and was whole and here she is now.

Here they are.

Cheek on his knees, arms wrapped around them. Curled up. Eyes closed. No headache. He's just so tired. He's tired enough to fall asleep right here and sleep through until tomorrow. Longer. It would be good to not be awake. It would be good if she had another one of those needles, and she would give it to him

First night in this house, sitting like this on the floor of the tub with water streaming over him like liquid moonlight. Clean, whatever that means anymore. He's not fooling anyone. He'll never be clean. Not even _she_ can do that.

Murmur, half muffled by his hair: _She saved my life and she got me killed. I guess._

 _I dunno._

And she asks _Do you love her?_

And it's so quiet and so gentle that his gut and heart and throat twist themselves into a single multilayered knot, winching tighter and tighter like it has to support all the weight of everything he's ever done, and his answer rides out on the last exhalation he can manage.

 _Yeah._

That simple.

 _Please._ He lowers his head even more, lowers it until it's completely hidden in the circle of his arms. All dark and quiet. Warm and numb inside himself. Now and then his inner world isn't infernal, or torturous. Now and then it's purely, mercifully empty. _Stop now. I don't want to anymore._

When he raises his head the shadows are lengthening into early afternoon, and he's alone. He gazes down at the dead butt of the cigarette, lifts a hand and chews at a loose bit of tape on his thumb as he wrestles air into his lungs.

 _I don't want to anymore._

Never did.


	26. you always were the one to show me how

Just want to note - in case it wasn't clear - that the Siken poetry that precedes these chapters has sometimes been tweaked slightly here and there regarding punctuation and the physical arrangement of the lines, partially for practical reasons and partially for effect. ❤️

 **Chapter 26: you always were the one to show me how**

But we always win and we never quit, see, we've won again, here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say _Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?_ \- Richard Siken

* * *

When she first got here, back when she was making like Carol and playing the sweet innocent little sunflower, she spent a lot of time with flowers. Lot of time in the garden that they found a work in progress, flowers but mostly vegetables. It feels like three lifetimes since she was a farmer's daughter, digging up potatoes and plucking plump tomatoes off vines, but even if that girl died, her ghost sticks around - or her dry skin, to put on like a mask and pretend for a while. Convincing enough.

Then everyone saw her kill and again, like with Carol, there was no point in pretending anymore. She traded the garden for the wall and her spade for her rifle and she never looked back. Sloughed off that old skin and didn't miss it.

Fuck that girl. In the end she wasn't good for much. In the end she wasn't the one who made it.

But here she is.

She helped with the warming weeks of mid-spring. Now it's early summer, flushed and full, and peas and firm reddening tomatoes hang on their vines, and closer to the wall a few rows of corn are rising. Peppers and carrots, and when a warm breeze sweeps over it all, it carries heady mingled scents of oregano and mint and rosemary.

She stands there with her boots in soft soil - moist from afternoon and overnight rain - watching two of the younger girls weeding by the strawberry patch and giggling to each other. They don't seem to have noticed her. Then one glances up, frowns slightly, looks away again. The giggling fades into whispering, and now the way they don't look at her is pointed.

It's pointless to be hurt or insulted. She knows what most of them think of her. It's not like Carol; Carol, once you know about her, isn't surprising. There's a hard edge to her face and her eyes and how she carries her muscles on her frame, and it fits her. An older woman, and tough in the way anyone has to be who survived that long out beyond the walls.

Carol doesn't frighten them. Even if maybe she should. Even now, Carol has a way of fitting herself into her surroundings. Beth figures once she had to. Once it was a form of survival camouflage. The less she was noticed, the less likely she was to be a target. That's clearly no longer a worry for her, but the skill remains.

But Beth.

Small. Pretty. Looks younger than she is. There are her scars, sure, but she's not the only one walking around with scars. Her blond ponytail and her tight jeans and her cowboy boots and her bracelets, and the little earrings she still wears. Look at her and think she can probably take care of herself all right, probably use a gun and fight if she had to. Kill walkers if necessary. That wouldn't be unexpected.

She stabs living men in the gut, the back, the head. She slits their throats. She takes them out with perfect headshot after perfect headshot, and her aim doesn't once waver. She does these things with cold precision, cold efficiency, and no visible regret, because she doesn't feel any. She doesn't count her kills.

If someone asked her those three questions, she wouldn't have answers for the first two, and for the third and last?

 _I did what I had to do._

She closes her eyes into the sun and wonders what Daryl's answers would be. Except she's pretty sure she already knows.

 _Don't matter. Don't matter._

 _Don't matter._

She doesn't even know why she's here. She doesn't remember deciding to come. No one asked her. She has no plan, no work she means to do. But now she opens her eyes and drops into a crouch between two sunflowers - not yet as tall as they will be by the end of the summer - and lays her hands over the soil, pushes them in. It's warm and wet and it yields to her, accepts her, and abruptly her throat locks up and her eyes sting.

She's tired of dying. It took him coming back from the dead for her to realize it.

She hasn't seen him since the day before yesterday, when she said that chilling goodnight to him. The one she's been thinking about as little as possible. Staying away from him has been half purposeful and half not; yesterday she pulled a shift on the wall and despite the rain she volunteered for a quick run out into the woods for mushrooms and mulberries. Together those took up the bulk of the day, and then she was tired. More than maybe she should have been, but she didn't sleep well.

So she went home.

Wonder of wonders, Maggie left her alone and Glenn followed suit. She doesn't expect it to last, but she'll take it while it does.

Fuck's sake, she's not the one who's crazy.

 _Sure._

She showered. Stood there under the warm spray and felt it stream down between her shoulderblades, looking down at her body. The rest of them put on a healthier layer of fat when they got here - even Rick - and got less knobby and less angular. But she hasn't, and it's not that she's been starving herself. It's as if her body literally rejects a significant amount of the nourishment she gives it. She doesn't eat a _lot_ \- doesn't want to, maybe just got too used to tiny portions - but she does eat. Yet she remains nearly as skinny as she was, ribs standing out more than they should, her breasts smaller than they were a year ago and cradled by slightly looser skin. They don't _hang,_ but if they had been bigger to start with she can tell they would be. The bones above them stand out too, and the hollows of her collarbones are deep. Her wrists. Her knees. Her thighs. Lean muscle beneath her skin, and very near the surface.

 _Like him._

She doesn't look like she belongs here.

She scrubbed herself until she was red and raw, worked shampoo roughly through her hair until her eyes were watering. Got out, toweled herself off, went to bed. Stared at the ceiling until she fell through the mattress and into the dark.

Woke up, and now she's here.

She lifts her hands from the ground and turns them palm-up, looks at them. Dark smears across them, streaks over her fingers. Caked under her nails.

His blood dried to almost this color. She refused to wash it off. No one tried to make her.

She's surrounded by life. Growing and green, flowers and food, and somewhere in the Zone he's alive. Miraculous. She can't forget that. Whatever else it is, however terrible, however much pain he's in and however much he's infecting her with it, it _is_ a miracle. If he's alive, if he wants to stay that way, there's hope.

If you don't have that, what's the point of living?

 _Right._

She rolls the soil between her fingertips, digs at it beneath her nails as she rises. The girls have moved on. A line of six crows are perched along the wall above the corn, observing her with cool, glittering black eyes.

Familiar eyes.

She turns and walks back over the warm, damp soil, beyond where it reaches the pavement, and past the gates toward home.

* * *

She has a book she's been working through, mostly when she can't sleep - in those sleepless periods before Rick walked Daryl through the gates, back when a _book_ would do anything for her in that regard. It's stupid, a mass market paperback historical romance with a lurid cover featuring a low-bodiced redheaded woman falling rapturously into a burly man's bare arms. It's the kind of thing her mother had a secret weakness for, and maybe it should hurt, having it now. But it doesn't hurt, not now and not when she picked it up on a run, grabbed it off the top of a pile at the foot of a convenience store shelf by the cash registers. She's made her way through it in small chunks, a few pages at a time. The plot is simple enough that she never forgets what's happened. Never loses track of what's going on.

It's also something she probably could have written in her sleep, knowing the tropes.

 _Damn romance novel._

She's not trying to sleep. But she's lying on her back with it in her hands, afternoon sun pooling on the bed, and her fingers are idly tracing the swoopy embossed letters of the title - _RANSOMED HEARTS_ \- as her gaze wanders down the lines.

 _"I can bear it no longer." Esmeralda's eyes flashed a brilliant green as she turned to face the man who had captured her body, captured her heart, and at last stood before her, stripped to the waist and unmasked. "For a fortnight and three days you have taunted me with promises of freedom. Now you come to me this way, as if you own me? As if I am some plaything to be toyed with, my mind and my body both?"_ _But didn't she_ wish _to be toyed with? Didn't she_ wish _to be his plaything? And as he moved toward her in the honey-gold lamplight of the ship's cabin, she shrank back before him, unable to fight the hot quivering in her most secret places. She ached for his hands on her, the nimble fingers of a master thief. She burned with shame - and with_ desire _as he pressed her down onto the creaking bed, his virile member throbbing through his breeches and against her thigh._ _"I_ do _own you," he growled, and the wild animal passion of his kiss sent her into a shuddering moan as he-_

She lets the book tumble from her fingers and turns her head, gazes blindly into the sunlight and closes her eyes. The thing is _full_ of scenes like this. She knows because she's done some skipping around, and also because she just knows. Predictable as hell.

Why it comforts her, maybe.

Hands. Her own lie loosely curled beside her. She's abruptly aware of them in the odd way you are when you're reminded that you _possess_ a specific part of your body, and she flexes them, listening to the whisper as the dry skin on the insides of her fingers rubs together.

She keeps coming back to his hands.

He could be assaulting any other part of himself - just about - and it wouldn't be as bad. His face, maybe. That would be worse. His _dick_ , which is horrible almost to the point of blackest black comedy. But he tears at his hands as if he's trying to strip away his most meaningful tethers to the world. The tools that allow him to touch and move and take and give.

Hurt and kill.

But so many other things. He's done them, with her. He's touched her and he's been gentle. Gentle as he ever was before, when it was like he was learning to touch someone for the first time. He's touched her and it hasn't been like _that._ Like it was in the clinic, in bed.

Like he wanted to _take_ her.

In another life - not the one before this but three - she lay in her warm bed in her warm house in her warm, happy, _normal_ existence, and she thought about things like what she found in her mother's guilty little pleasures, and while they were tame compared to what's lying beside her now, they did something to her. They filled her with half-formed images, sounds, sensations - a bigger body laying hers down and holding her, strong hands on her, smooth and confident, sliding up under her shirt and tugging down her pajama pants, soft mouth on hers pushing her lips apart and entering her there as that smooth, confident hand pressed its smooth, confident fingers between her thighs. Those fingers became her fingers, and without meaning to she found the nub of flesh at the apex of her lips that sent heat rippling through her and she worked it in rapid circles with slick fingertips until she was arching and gasping, biting back her moans.

Her sexual fantasies were never very clear. Not at first, anyway. She was getting herself off at twelve years old. Another year to figure out that she could finger herself, and by then the images churning through her mind, though still unclear, had begun to take on more coherence. More complexity. Her mother's books kept helping; the library's selection did as well, and she found things there that went into considerably more detail. _Throbbing members_ and _pulsing manhoods_ and _quivering petals_ and _weeping cores_ and their specific relationships with each other, in terms of the mechanics.

A romance novel hero. Dashing and bold and maybe a little bit dangerous. Maybe the whole thing a little bit forbidden. Wanting but not _supposed_ to want. She devoured it. When you're just figuring out what the hell sex even _is,_ everything is fabulously sexy.

 _Making love_ was still all of it. Candles. Silk sheets. Roses. Or the parapets of castles and flower gardens under the moon, if you wanted to get daring about it.

She's not sure when she started making the transition to _cocks_ and _pussies_ and wanting to _get fucked_ , but it was a lot later, and it was a lot more secret, and it made her feel dirty and blushingly delighted both at once, that bigger body but now with rough hands that pinned her down and did what they wanted with her. Not all the time, but.

A lot.

Then the world ended. And somehow after that, aside from some fumbling and groping that never really went anywhere, Jimmy's and Zach's hands both between her legs over her underwear and up her shirt and clearly not sure what to do with her…

Somehow after that she never got around to it. Fucking.

Was going to, with Zach. The actual thing. Maybe when he came back from that run. She was sure. Then that became a moot point.

Then the world ended again.

And again.

Now she lies here and she thinks about Daryl Dixon's hands.

When they aren't ruined. When they're whole. When he's not trying to destroy them. Strong and thick and thickly calloused, and yet somehow the skin on their backs, despite being spotted and crisscrossed with scars, was unexpectedly smooth the first time she touched it. Those scars, almost delicate somehow. Two slashed across the first knuckles of his right fore and middle fingers. A larger and thicker line high on the back of his left. A shiny patch of tissue on the side of his left ring finger that looks like it may have been a burn. Others, smaller. She never kept count.

But she paid attention.

That hand folded into hers, fingers threaded. He squeezed, and she could feel the strength waiting in him. Waiting to be called to use.

That Daryl. Sweet, hesitant, innocently eager once he realized what he could do. He was so careful, examining her foot and wrapping it later. Hand on her shoulder, on her back. Heavy, and the heaviness was good.

Picking her up and carrying her. Holding her. Hand on her side. Hand low on her thigh, her knee. Even when he got braver he was so careful. He was still afraid of getting it wrong. She could tell. Getting it wrong and fucking it up and having to face her anger.

Maybe not being allowed to do it anymore.

There _were_ candles. There _was_ music. She thought about climbing into that coffin with him and curling up against his side, head on his shoulder and hand over his heart, and falling asleep to that rhythm. Lying in her narrow hospital bed with scratchy sheets, gazing out the window at dead Atlanta and thinking about doing that with him.

He's not gone. She's seen him. Here, she's _seen_ him. He's weak and he's in pain and he's so scared, but he's here, and for a while _he_ was the one touching her.

Hands.

 _Hands._

 _Unzipping her jeans. Fingers nosing into her fly - clumsy but that doesn't matter. Breath catching as he settles himself half over her with that caught breath warm in the hollow of her throat when it finally escapes. He's nervous. Of course he's nervous. But that eagerness is also present, and he feels his way over her mound, over the thin cloth of her panties, and it's not like Jimmy and it's not like Zach. It's not like them because they didn't_ need _her and she didn't_ need _them, and and she spreads her legs for him and moans as his fingertips find her clit and press._

 _He's nervous, yes. But he knows what he's doing._

 _Kissing her. Lifting his head and arching his mouth over hers, hungry but still with that hesitant gentleness, waiting for her to rake her hands into his hair and tug him in harder. More. Licking her lips apart and curling his tongue against hers as his burning fingers wriggle beneath the frayed elastic of her waistband and she's so wet, she's so fucking_ wet, _and he whimpers and she feels the bulge of his cock against her hip as he rolls himself into a slow wave._

 _She wants. This. Him, heavy and rough on top of her. It's not a damn romance novel. It's not pretty and perfect but it's so_ sweet, _flickering candlelight and the old worn silk of the coffin interior against her cheek and her bare arms, the clumsiness and the awkwardness of the angle and the tightness of the space fading as her pleasure pounds through her. As he draws it, calls it, flicks her swollen clit with the tip of his middle finger, thick and slippery with her juices, groaning raggedly and scraping his teeth down her jaw as she whines at the ceiling and clutches at him and trembles and harder, harder faster Daryl oh my God oh oh God like that oh God yesYES_

She's wrenching herself up, spine a bow and mouth open in a silent yell as her fingers work in furious, stuttering circles and her free hand fists the loose sheet. Holding on, because she has to, with so much dense heat pumping through her. She could fall upward, smash herself into the ceiling.

Without him to anchor her.

Sun in her face as she sags, panting, sticky fingers still stuffed into her panties and her jeans halfway down her thighs. She gazes unblinking into the glare, her eyes watering and her lips dry.

She has no idea when she last did this. Really did it. Not just a few half-hearted strokes but _release._

Months. Maybe longer. Months, with part of her just…

Dead.

He's not dead. He's not gone. He's _here,_ even if not all of him is. He's here, even if his hands are in ruins and he won't stop ruining them.

Torn open over her clit. His blood mingling with her wet. Slick as he presses a raw finger into her cunt.

She shudders and turns away, jerks her hand free, tucks it against her chest and clenches her eyes shut. She's fucked up. This is fucked up. This is exactly what she shouldn't be wanting. Talk about _dangerous._ Talk about _forbidden._

A damn romance novel, sure, if _romance_ means a hero with a broken brain who - she's pretty sure - fantasizes about hurting her on a semi-regular basis. Who sees the world burning and demons crawling through the flames. Who calls her a stupid little bitch and says he hates her and he should have let her die.

Who says he loves her so much, and he's sorry. He's so sorry.

He wants to get better.

 _You will._

The sun slides over her and across the floor. Eventually, hands still tucked against her chest and her knees drawn up as much as her half pulled-down jeans will allow, she falls asleep.

If she dreams, by some mercy she doesn't remember.


	27. it's the nature of my circuitry

So if you are - like me - deeply disturbed by violent animal cruelty, you may want to skim/skip the middle of this. Again, one of the things I'm trying to do here is horrify and sicken _myself,_ and that's what I've done. Like... Again, I feel like I should maybe apologize, but I did say at the beginning that this would be awful. Yeah. ❤️

 **Chapter 27: it's the nature of my circuitry**

 _There's a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet staring up at us like we're something interesting._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

This is a problem.

He stands in the garage doorway for a while. Not sure how long. Time remains a slippery thing and he neither likes nor trusts it, and resents it deeply for stubbornly moving forward all the time. It doesn't matter anyway; he stands and looks from his bandaged hands to the shelves and the tools and parts and the bulky shape under the tarp and back to his hands and to the shelves and tools and parts and tarp and his hands again, the cycle repeating until he's gripped by a vague kind of vertigo and has to shut his eyes to make it stop.

Stress and light. Stress and light make the storm come. It makes as much sense as anything else she's said, and since yesterday he's had some time to mull it over and has decided that it's probably true. He hates the light anyway, and he has since he woke up in the fucking hospital. Indirect daylight. Filtered by clouds. Moonlight. Sunrise and sunset. These, he can bear. Anything else is uncomfortable even without the headaches, and now that he thinks about it he can't deny the pattern.

He walked under the moon because the moon was kind. Because he looked up at it and didn't have to look away. Because it gave him shadows in which to hide himself. Made everything white and black and therefore cleansed him, to the extent that anything ever could. But he also walked under the moon because the moon didn't hurt his brain, because the moon wasn't a drill boring in through the hole in his skull and pressing the blunt heads of ball peen hammers against his eyeballs from the inside, trying to pop them out onto his cheeks.

The storms have been worse since he got here. But they were always coming. Rolling in and out like tides. Pain and fear and fear of the pain and the pain the fear always brings.

(There came a point, long ago in that flow of time that he no longer trusts, when he lost any real distinction between fear and pain. For all practical intents and purposes, to him they might as well be the same thing.)

But it's dim in here, and the afternoon sun is at his back. Walked here from shadow to shadow, like she led him. Showed him the path to follow, just like she did before on the road. He can trust her. Yes. He can.

It's dim in here and cool, and that much he likes.

But looking down at his hands again, this is a problem.

Shouldn't be one. Shouldn't even be here. Shouldn't give a fuck. Should go home, curl up in his nest and try to read until he feels the storm threatening or he falls asleep. He should go huddle on the back porch and smoke and try not to think, try to throw blocks in front of the wildly spinning wheels that are his brain a lot of the time.

Should go see if she's home. If maybe she would just let him sit with her. She wouldn't have to talk. They wouldn't have to say anything. Just be with her, and she also would make the wheels stop spinning and the storm drift away.

It doesn't have to be complicated. He doesn't have to be afraid.

He drops his hands to his sides and takes a step forward into the garage. Another. He can do this. He doesn't have to do it perfectly. Doesn't even matter _what_ he does; was here before and fucked around with it a little and got his hands greasy and saw it, saw how some of it might work, and it was almost good. He's not going to get in trouble, and no one expects anything of him.

So.

The bandages on his fingers are thick and cumbersome, tips wrapped with tape, and when he tries to touch anything, they slip. Carol changed them for him this morning and she didn't make them any lighter. Didn't ask her to. Like this, it's been horrible - he can't _bite,_ can't _chew,_ can't _pick._ He's been gnawing filmy layers of skin off his dry lips but that doesn't scratch the same itch and his stomach churns into his chest cavity and bugs crawl through his veins and it's hard not to squirm. Maybe why he's here, walking along the line of shelves, scanning the pieces and the tools. Something to _do._

What the fuck happens even if he _does_ get the bike running? What does that mean? Does he take it and go? Does he start _working_ for these pricks, going on runs like he vaguely remembers doing at the prison? Does someone else take it? Does it just sit here under the tarp, reaccumulating its dust?

He hates all of those possibilities. Stops and grits his teeth and stares down at the poured concrete of the floor. Anger rising like a storm in itself. Keep their fucking hands off what's his. If this is his, it's _his,_ and they've got no right to it. And he doesn't have to work for them. Doesn't owe them a fucking thing, not his ass on a line. They can send their own blood sacrifices out there to get ripped apart for a few crates of canned goods and condensed milk. He doesn't give a shit. Twisted faces emerging from the walls and the bike under the tarp stirring as if it's ready to wake. Roar this thing out of here and run them all over, roll through this fucking place and take out everyone he sees. Skulls and spines crushed under his tires, blood spray in his face. He'll-

Stop. Close eyes. Breathe in-out, repeat. Hands braced on the shelf in front of him. He's all right.

He can be all right.

After a while the hot pounding in his chest and throat and between his temples subsides. Opens his eyes and there's only the faintest flickering at the edges of his vision, shapes moving that would take clear form if he looked directly at them - or would vanish entirely. Just cool dimness. Just him.

 _You can do this._

Not _her._ Not Rick. Not. Not Merle. Someone else.

He knows.

 _You can do this. You can. You can be all right._

Down at his hands, staring again. Shaking. All wrapped up and so clumsy, and he can't feel. Torn up beneath, but like this he can't feel anything, and if he can't feel, how the hell is he supposed to know what he's doing? Could have done so much of this blindfolded, once. Learned that fucking bike by heart. Learned it by _touch._

Pointless. Useless like this. He won't be that. He'll be sick and broken and wretched and filthy and disgusting, he'll be nobody and nothing, but he will _not_ be useless.

Pointless… Well, everything is pointless anyway.

He starts to peel off the bandages.

* * *

Later. Doesn't track the sun. It's actually good; untrustworthy time slips away and he's content to let it go. All disappears into metal and oil and piecing together, cleaning, identifying problem after problem and addressing each with a calm, steady methodology. He _becomes_ his hands, and the raw places, the parts where he's chewed his fingers open, the scabs that have cracked and broken and the ones holding tight, and the swelling lingering in his one finger - he shoves it to the side. Can. The storms lay him low but his tolerance for pain is enormous and his ability to ignore it is accordingly so.

 _He can._ He has work to do.

He sees the thing take shape. The outer structure is complete, or complete enough, with some needed additions and subtractions. The innards are the puzzle. But he can feel how it has to be. This is how he does things; he doesn't plan. He simply moves through the problem like he moves through the woods, tracking the logic like game. He doesn't think about it. If he stops to think about it, he won't be able to do it anymore. He'll lose the trail. He'll stumble. Trip. He'll fall on his ass, and won't he feel stupid then.

He _is_ stupid. But he didn't lose this.

Sitting back, greasy hands dangling between his bent knees, looking up at the thing. Heard someone moving around in the house not too long ago; noted and ignored like the pain. Provided they don't come out here to bother him, they're of no significance.

Everything he cares about at the moment is right here in front of him.

What happens after, he doesn't know. What this might eventually mean, he has no idea. But he knows he can get it running. Won't even be that hard. Get it running well. Fast. Thrumming with power. Hungry for road.

Back to when he was thinking about this. What it _might_ eventually mean. The hateful options, the ones that made him so teeth-grindingly angry, but then there was another one. Came and went so fast he basically missed it.

 _Take it and go._

But he wants to stay.

Stares down at his hands. Chewed up, stripped cuticles and ragged skin and jagged nails. Blood oozing from a couple of scabs torn and peeled back, red brownish with grease. His pulse throbbing in his infected finger. He can feel it now, the pain, and with it the fear hooks its own jagged nails into his gut. Not a headache. Not a storm. Something far more petty.

Contempt. Ugly. It's ugly and he's ugly and everything about him is ugly. Sitting here with his filthy, scabby hands, clothes dirty now - not that they were exactly _clean_ to begin with - stringy hair hanging in his face, bony shoulders hunched. Scarred all over. Gaping hole in his head that they can't see, not like it _really_ is, but there with its stench of decay and the maggots wriggling in his exposed brain tissue, they'll sense it. And he'll never stop hurting. He'll never stop being afraid. They'll sense that too.

Denise says he's _fucked up_ and she's right. He loves a girl so much he's incandescent with it, and he thinks about hacking her head off and setting her on fire and shoving a gun into her mouth to blow out the back of her skull.

Doesn't matter what he wants. Doesn't matter what other people want. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't stay.

He doesn't belong.

He's lifting his right hand, turning it and examining it for the best place to dig his teeth in, when there's a soft, questioning _mrow?_ And something equally soft in tactile terms stroking itself against his bare forearm. He starts, hand forgotten, and jerks his head to the side to see a small calico cat sitting down by the front wheel and blinking slowly up at him with enormous green eyes.

He blinks back.

She cocks her head, gives him another couple of slow, self-satisfied blinks, then twists her back gracefully to the side and begins to groom her flank. Her patches of black and white and orange are large and vivid, black completely covering one ear and orange blazing the other. Her fur is glossy in the low sunlight, and without thinking he extends his hand toward her. She starts, pulls back slightly, but instead of bolting she sniffs delicately at his fingers with squinted eyes-

And butts her head against the heel of his palm, purring far louder than something that small should be capable of.

He always liked cats. Wanted one, for a while. Found an abandoned litter of five kittens when he was seven and put them in a shoebox and hid them under his bed, but he had no idea how to feed them, couldn't figure it out and was too scared to ask anyone. They wouldn't lick milk from his fingertips when he held their tiny thrumming bodies against his chest, and one by one over the course of a couple of days they weakened and didn't crawl around anymore, their needy mews dropped into snuffles, and he was sitting on his bedroom floor and gazing helplessly down at them and fighting sickening, lurching panic because they were _dying_ and he _didn't know what to do_ when his father punched the door open and that was the end of that.

His father used them for target practice on a stump out back and made him watch.

He told himself after that it was quick. They didn't feel anything. It was better than starving to death.

Under the moon that night, going back out and finding what he could. Little scraps of fur. Bones. Other things he didn't want to pick up. Cradling them in his bloody hand and trying to dig a hole for them with his mother's rusty gardening spade, everything a pale blur through his tears.

Maybe they hadn't been abandoned. Maybe the mother was just gone for a while.

If he'd left them where he found them they might have been fine.

This one, now. Arching her back under his hand and purring and purring, rubbing her head against his wrist. Cat-smile; he's never sure if they're really smiling or if it's just the shape of their mouths, but it always _looks_ like a smile. She doesn't care what he looks like. She doesn't care whether or not he _belongs._ She knows he's here and he has a warm hand that he's making available to her, he's making no sudden moves, and that's enough for her.

One reason why he always liked cats: they seemed so uncomplicated. It didn't seem like it would take very much to make one happy. Not like people.

Didn't seem like it would be so easy to fuck things up. Didn't seem like they would hurt him just because they could.

Petting this one, over and over down the curving length of her spine. Breathing getting easier, heart slower. Everything else fading into an indistinct ruddy golden background. How he doesn't belong and how he shouldn't stay. This cat appears to think he _should_ stay, at least for right now. This cat appears ready to spend the next however long within him, and when he folds his legs and makes a bowl of them she slinks over his thigh, turns around a couple of times and settles with her chin on her paws.

So still petting her. She's a warm, vibrating little weight in the cradle of his body, and she's so small and really she's very fragile, and very trusting, all her guard down, and before she has time to hiss or scratch: gripping her by the head and the spine and nails punching through her skin and _twisting,_ twisting in a sharp snap of his wrist, her yowl pinching into an agonized and hideously human scream that cuts off as her neck snaps and blood drips from her nose and gaping mouth and runs over his greasy hands.

Still twisting. Twisting and twisting her head around and around until her fur and skin starts to tear away, blood trickling and then gushing to join the streams down his fingers and wrists. Dead blood, still hot, flesh tearing away into strips and bones cracking as he yanks hard and her head rips free and trails muscle, tendon, pouring arteries and esophagus dripping bile, churned pink and red and splintered pale bone.

Holds it. Head. Limp little corpse. Soaked to the forearms in blood, sitting in a pool of it. Stench of it, of shit, ammonia-reek of piss. He turns her head in his palm and gazes into her blank bulging eyes.

Crouched before him, peeking around the front of the bike, a rusty razor-blade grin set into an eyeless face as black beetles flood across the floor toward him, over his legs and up his body and arms, swarming over his hands in a vast chorus of needy mews.

The furry body in his lap suddenly twitches, hisses, catches claws in his pant leg as it launches itself away. She scampers a few feet from him and stops, looking reproachfully over her shoulder. He stares at her, motionless with his hands loose in his lap. Trying to remember what breathing involves.

Door open behind him. _Clack_ of the latch and creak and he whips his head around, remembering to breathe and breathing so hard because here he is with his bloody hands and blood all over the floor and blood everywhere and it's Aaron smiling pleasantly at him, though uncertain. Gaze scanning rapidly around the garage as if establishing a lack of disaster.

No, there is no disaster. No blood. There's the cat, primly grooming herself again. Hasn't run. He's sort of amazed. Got the fuck away from him but hasn't run.

Ah, he's met what sounds like _ohsee._

Looks back at Aaron, nonplussed. He's struggling. Floundering and hoping it's not too visible. Doesn't know what really happens anymore. What? What did he say?

Aaron repeats it patiently: _Oh see._ The letters. Outside Cat. She was here when they moved in, wouldn't come into the house but she hangs around and not just because they feed her. She likes people. Comes right up to them, loves to be petted. She just doesn't want to be inside.

Clearly Daryl has met her. Are they getting along?

She isn't looking at him. She's not looking at him in that pointed way cats have of not looking at someone when they're annoyed. But she's alive. Her head is on her shoulders. She's fine. She was in his lap and he was petting her. That was all. Nothing else happened.

Flash of razor blades in the shadows. He won't look there.

Yeah. She's nice.

Well. Good.

Silence. Awkward silence, and he doesn't want to fill it and he doesn't know how. What he _wants_ is to slide his back against a wall and pull his knees to his chest and go to town on the cuticles he has left, the jagged bits of nail that haven't been bitten down to the quick. Pick the scabs loose and make some new ones.

So it's getting on to dinnertime. More awkward, kind of a cough. Glances back at Aaron and Aaron's face is awkward to match the silence, but not afraid and not about to leave. Something stubborn there. Not altogether unfamiliar. Dinnertime, and he's about to start throwing some spaghetti together. Totally not mandatory, Daryl can do what he wants, but if he would like to partake of said spaghetti, there's more than enough.

Him and Eric and Daryl. More than enough to go around three ways.

Eric. Reminder of Eric. Reminder that Eric exists. Red-faced father-like part of his brain stumbling to its feet snarling _fuckin' faggots_ and the rest of him turning wearily around to face it, _oh shut the fuck up you piece of shit._

 _No one cares._

Little smile. It's some pretty serious spaghetti.

Gazes down at his hands. The grease is actually acting as a kind of cover. Washed, it'll be far more obvious what bad shape they're in. They'll get looks. Of course they'll get looks. He'll get looked _at._ Even if nothing gets said about it.

 _They'll see this and that's all they'll see._

Is that really true?

It's getting close to sunset. He could go home and not fear the light. He should. Go home and eat whatever they have there and curl up alone in the dark. Wait for sleep. Hope for no storms. Hope he doesn't dream. This is his life now. The life in which he doesn't belong.

Sure as shit doesn't belong here either.

 _You can do this._

 _You can be all right._

No. He can't. He can't ever be all right. He'll never be all right. He won't get better. There's no such thing as better.

But she would want him to try.

Okay. Sigh. Hands, of all of him the parts that belong here the least. The most ill-fitting. But whatever. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Okay, yeah. If there's enough. If Aaron is asking.

He'll stay.

Great.

Aaron leaves. Door closes. He turns to face the bike again and it's still there, scythe-claws curled around the spokes of the wheel, tilting its head. Thoughtful. Considering him. Maybe curl of amused smile beyond the blades. Isn't he interesting, and isn't it interesting what he's trying to do now.

Jaw tight. In the corner of his vision, the pale blotchy flicker of OC trotting off into the gathering dusk.

 _I won't. You can't make me. You can't make me be like that._

Laughter. Peals of it. Hands over his mouth, trying to hold it in. It hurts, scratches bitten nails down the back of his throat and snags in his chest like a string of ancient fish hooks. He tastes grease and dirt and blood. Laughing and laughing. It's such a fucking joke, such a _cliche,_ how he thinks there's any externalizing this. How he thinks he can separate any of these shattered pieces from each other, pit them against themselves in some kind of pathetic contest for his own soul. Good Daryl and Bad Daryl and Sad Daryl and Daryl In Love and Daryl Who Dreams Of Ripping Cats And Babies And Women Apart With His Bare Hands.

There is one Daryl Dixon and one alone. And he is what he is, and he will be that way, and nothing can change that.

Until something makes it stop.

* * *

Dinner is doable. Not horrible. Not horrifying. He doesn't attack anyone. He doesn't attack himself. He doesn't get angry, doesn't have a headache, doesn't run. He scrapes together everything he can, makes a superhuman effort, gets himself to use utensils. Is clearly not good at it; it's as if something has happened to the dexterity in his fingers and they can't handle a fork. Speaking of his fingers, they do look terrible, but they aren't bleeding and he doesn't make them bleed, and he doesn't get looks. Not really.

There's light, meaningless conversation, to which he contributes grunts, so it's mostly between Aaron and Eric. Eric is nervous. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't give a shit because Aaron _isn't_ nervous, and somehow that serves as an anchorpoint. One of the three of them at least believes he's in control of the situation. He's not, but sometimes illusions are nearly as good as the real thing. There's a kind of placebo effect in terms of engaging with reality. There are points when if you behave as if something is true, it almost is.

Go with it.

The spaghetti is serious. He doesn't know what that means but it feels as true as anything else.

Once again the time turns malleable, runs through his fingers like water, and it's like he blinks and he's at the door. Being said goodnight to. He has to go back. He has to go- Not home. Where he sleeps and is most of the time. Go back there, and sleep.

It's dark and he can travel without fear. So he can travel without pain. Probably.

Aaron: quiet. That it was good having him here, he should come back. Not a lie, though it makes no fucking sense. This somehow _does_ hurt, and his bones tighten up. Suddenly that walk back is very unattractive. Those walls within walls. That room he sleeps in, where things wait in the corners and crawl across the ceiling, and insects flow over the floor, except that pile of blankets and pillows is the only place he feels even vaguely safe.

But he doesn't want to.

Doesn't know what the fuck he wants.

He has to go. Turns without a word, biting at his lips. Fingers twitching; the itch between them and all beneath his skin and in their tips is starting to buzz to life. If he hurries he can get there before it gets too bad, give his hands to Carol, make himself let her hold them and wrap them back up in gauze and tape, it might not be too late and he might not make it worse.

He ate but he's hungry for himself.

Okay, yeah. Goodnight.

Doesn't say that last. It's stupid. Nothing about the night is _good_ unless you're comparing it to the day.

Sidewalk. Cool air and the smell of the dark. He fumbles in his pocket for cigarettes, lighter. Little flare, smoke pouring into his lungs. Rick would say he _did good._ Got through it. Behaved like a human being. Rick would say that was good and so would Denise and so would _she_ and all of them, they would all say that. Except maybe the Boy, but whatever. The Boy is perfectly free to feel how he feels, and isn't incorrect for feeling that way.

Did good. He wants to. He bites down on the filter because it's better than biting down on himself and fixes his eyes on the pavement. It's a while still before moonrise. All around him, fireflies rising from the ground like tiny sparks.

He did good. Can. _I can be good._

Please, please let him do it. Be that. Everything he's been through, surely it's not too much to ask.

Bullshit. He has to know he owes more than he's owed. Everything he's done, there's no way he can balance these scales. If balance even counted for anything, but justice is a sick lie, there's no such thing as any kind of cosmic balance, and the world isn't only unfair; it's _anti_ fair. Antithetical to fairness. Good people suffer and die, or they would if there was any such thing as _good people._ Bad people thrive in this brave new world. Everyone is infected. Everyone is diseased.

And in the end it doesn't matter because no one belongs here. No one belongs here anymore but the dead.

Well. Doesn't matter. They'll all get there.

Only a matter of time.

When he bites down again on the filter, he bites it clean off. He plucks the cigarette from his mouth and spits the filter into his palm. The end looks so neatly cut.

Neat as a razor blade.


	28. there is a place that still remains

**Chapter 28: there is a place that still remains**

 _Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Rick in the morning.

He remembers. Standing in the doorway and looking out on the porch, he remembers so hard and so fast it almost literally knocks him down. Not clear, not really - kind of blurry, lurching, camera zooming in and out like the cinematographer in his head is badly drunk - but _vivid,_ and he braces himself one-handed on the doorframe and bites at his lips to keep back the whimper.

Like a dog, in his head. Should be resentful to think about it like that again but he's not. It simply _hurts,_ hurts like something lost, because it is.

He remembers.

Morning at the prison. Walking out into the yard, early, early in spring when everything was green and the gardens were starting to come in with real earnestness and birds were trilling in the trees with a kind of giddy exulting because winter was _over_ and it was warm again, and Rick sitting there on one of the steps with the Baby in his arms, little body against his chest, murmuring something to her. Standing there just like this and watching the two of them. He did. Everything was quiet and even the couple of walkers rattling the fences didn't disturb the peace.

Kept it. Rick like a sheriff because neither of them can fight their own natures, patrolling the place with his will alone. Laying invisible hands on things with deep calm. It's in him, or it was then. He's such a fucking prick, such piece of shit with all his own sickness and so self-righteous about it, but that was in him too and it was palpable and strong and it ached. Throbbed beneath everything in him, like Rick was very gently beating him apart from the inside out. A kind of longing for which he had no name, like if you could long for something you already have.

 _Family._

Had one. Family, home. For a while - short - he did. Rick put away his gun and everyone started to build something and it was good and _he_ was good, and he was stupid enough to think they might be able to hold onto it. Lose individual people, sure, but hold onto the whole.

They don't get to be that stupid anymore. None of them. But afterward he sat on another porch with _her_ and she told him what _she_ was stupid enough to believe, and he told her she wasn't stupid. It was supposed to be that way. It wasn't her fault it didn't work out.

Knowing it was his.

Bandaged fingers pressing into the wood, and pain. As if he could tear it away like flesh. Because this is all going to fall apart sooner or later, but fuck, _fuck,_ now he thinks about what if he takes it to pieces simply by being here. What if he's the catalyst. What if it happens again.

Didn't occur to him, somehow.

This place shouldn't be here anyway. Doesn't belong. But he looks at the Baby on Rick's lap now and he thinks.

 _This is how it's supposed to be._

No. _Stop_. That's a lie. It doesn't matter how sweet and innocent and defenseless the Baby is. The Baby doesn't deserve anything, because no one does, and the Baby should have been dead a long time ago. The Baby belongs here least of anyone.

Except maybe him.

He shouldn't be out here in this quiet morning, this peace. He _really_ doesn't belong in _this,_ not with the ghosts of screams echoing in the dark recesses of his brain. There's nothing peaceful in him and his quiet is merely a cover for the howling rage inside. Should go back to his damn room and stay there until he's too hungry to do so any longer, then go back in once he's eaten.

But he doesn't want to. Doesn't want to be in there, in that seething dimness with horrors lurking in all the corners and way more corners than it should have. Out here is where he wants to be, where the air isn't thick with shadows, where there aren't any corners at all. And even if he shouldn't be here, even if he's like a festering sore on an otherwise clean, smooth patch of skin, he could grab for a piece of this, steal it like he's stolen every blessed second with _her,_ keep it for himself.

For a while. A short one.

He's already a fucking thief of the worst kind. This won't make it worse than it is.

He steps out onto the porch, and a board and the door creak both together when he pulls the latter closed after him, like they're complaining. Like they don't think much of this and they want that made clear.

Rick half turns. Doesn't seem startled.

Good. That's good, and he's not sure why.

He walks toward the steps, and Rick and the Baby, and without the support of the doorframe he feels very unsteady. Feels like the floor is moving under his bare feet. He glances down and he can practically see the wood warping and rolling beneath him, and then he _can_ see it, and through the gaps in the boards there are flashes of deep fire far below.

This place is set over an infernal pit. It's only a matter of time before it falls.

His weight is bending it. Pushing it down. Widening those cracks almost to the point where something might slip through. He clenches his fists until they hurt and fixes his gaze forward. Over Rick's head. Across the street, toward where he knows she was last night, where she might still be.

He doesn't feel any better, but he doesn't feel any worse so he's prepared to consider the situation acceptable.

Rick, looking back at him again. Edge of what might be a tiny smile. He fights back the now-familiar desire to punch that smile right off Rick's face. It's not a smug smile. There's nothing self-righteous about it, not this time. Nothing arrogant.

He doesn't need to be like this.

Rick inclines his head toward the step beside him. Doesn't speak, but the invitation is clear, and it's like a fist against the inside of his breastbone, because it was only a few days ago that he was snarling that he would break the Baby's neck if Carol didn't take it away, and now Rick will allow him that close?

Rick _wants_ him that close?

God, he should just go. Really should.

He doesn't go. Or he doesn't leave. Where he goes is to the step, and he sinks down on the spot Rick indicated. He's still as far away from the two of them as he can reasonably get in that location, and his guts are trying to bore holes through his skin and crawl out of him like wriggling snakes, but he's sitting and nothing is happening. He's not _doing_ anything.

Could be all right.

Rick doesn't talk. This is unexpected. Rick almost always talks to him; it's a central feature of Rick's approach. Does it less than he was a week or so ago, but he's still doing it, and nothing that occurs as a result appears to be deterring him.

(This approach is not, in fact, unique to Rick, and it hasn't escaped his notice. Talking to him seems to be how all the people who have attempted to make a connection with him have gone about it. It's true that apart from touching him - which, fortunately, they all have identified the very real dangers of - there isn't really any other way to make a connection at all, but he finds it both hollowly amusing and profoundly exasperating that they would be employing the one method he was terrible at even at his best and can barely manage now. They talk _at_ him.)

(Except _her._ )

(Except Denise. Perhaps Denise as well.)

Rick doesn't talk, and he's bleakly grateful for that. Whatever inane thing Rick might come out with would probably make it freshly difficult to keep from assaulting him.

He sits. Folds his hands between his knees, holds onto himself. Stares down at his feet. The step. The grass, the front walk, the sidewalk and street beyond. His eyes dart, twitch, resist his attempt to keep them still. He's trying to watch everything at once. Not a bad habit, but one he wishes he had more control over.

They shift to Rick. The Baby. The Baby is sucking on its fist and staring back at him, and violent hatred rears up in him, coiled like one of those snakes his gut is trying to become, fangs dripping venom.

Fuck, he doesn't want to be _like this._

 _Judith._

God. God, he could tear his hair out in bloody clumps. Feels like he is. Abruptly determined to do so, without warning dedicated to this new form of self-torture. Whipping his own shoulders and back as he gropes through the rubble, cuts his fingers on the scatter of papers, hunts with fractured attention and no one clear object in mind.

No. He has one. Several, actually.

He stares at the Baby and the Baby stares back, and he doesn't think he's imagining the challenge in its wide, solemn eyes.

So there's _Judith._ Fuck it, there is. And Rick and Michonne and Maggie and Glenn and Carol. _Carl._ Right, he has those. Those aren't so difficult anymore, even the Boy's. They feel solid, tangible, and he can grasp them and they don't escape his weak and trembling grip.

Now there's also _Tara._ But she wasn't all.

Isn't all.

He closes his eyes and fumbles painfully through himself. Finds a wrinkled sheet of loose leaf and scrambles it into his shaking, bleeding hands.

 _Eugene._

Soft inhalation from Rick's direction. So quiet but the shock is hard and sharp as a scream. He said it out loud, then, and he's wondering with miserable, resentful hopelessness how to explain what he's trying to do when even _he_ doesn't know, but Rick doesn't say anything. Still.

Except then, on a breath: _Yeah. That's right._

Jesus, don't treat him like a fucking _child,_ like he needs someone to attach training wheels to him through the process and give him a gold star every time he achieves something so basic as the proper articulation of a proper noun. Don't fucking _do_ that. But the thing is that it doesn't _feel_ like that, and he finds himself continuing without even deciding that he's going to.

Big man, reddish hair, creative with the profanity. The vowel, the shape of it and the way it feels traveling over the back of his tongue. _A._ Starts that way. Appropriate.

 _Abe. Abraham._

Nothing more from Rick but silent expectation, and not the kind he immediately wants to resent. He licks his dry lips. Possibly it's getting easier now. The smallest bit.

Possible. It's possible.

Girl. Tough and pretty. Very short shorts. Didn't care about it whatsoever but he could tell in an academic way that men would lust after her, and Abraham did.

 _Rosita._

Yes. Can tell himself that. Doesn't need Rick for it. He's getting it. It's in there, all this information. He didn't lose it. His cataloging system simply took a bullet to the face and it's only a question of retrieval.

 _You can do this._

Hatred blacker and colder and more vicious than any so far. How dare he encourage himself like this? How _dare_ he place value on anything he's done? That's obscene. At _best_ his actions are without worth or merit, meaningless, and in those ways they correspond with the rest of him and with everything else. He has no right to even consider taking satisfaction in himself like that. It's merely a mark of how unsalvageably ruined he is that he's having to work so hard.

But he also sort of doesn't give a shit about any of that.

 _Sasha._ And Tyreese is dead. And that fucking priest, that sniveling little weasel of a man. Had a name too. Somewhere in there, he keeps it, even though it's utterly useless now. What reason would he have to ever speak to that man? Speak about him, about what he is? He's a joke within a joke and both of them are bad ones.

For a moment or two, nothing. Then Rick, another inhalation of the kind he performs when he's about to speak, and a terse hiss shuts him up.

Eyes snap open, jaw cracking in his ears it's locked shut so tight. No. Shut the fuck up. He has to do this himself, doesn't Rick _get_ that? What's the point of this exercise if he can't do it himself? He can't have Rick following him everywhere like some kind of fucking _translator_ for a drooling moron who can't remember the names or words for things.

Let him do it himself.

Okay. And Rick backs off, shifting the Baby in his lap, nodding. Actually backs the hell off.

Okay.

Not just okay; wondrous. He's staring at Rick again. No damn training wheels. He's standing on his own. Being left to wobble. He'll fall in a few seconds anyway, but that he's being granted the chance to _not_ do so.

Priest. Whisper that scores open the back of his throat. There it is. _Gabriel._

Yes.

Is that all of them? Is that all? Staring at his hands. One single spot of blood on the back of his right forefinger from where one of the wounds has broken open again. He woke up with the swelling in his middle finger down but he's nowhere near healed. But even so.

Yes, even so.

Fire between the gaps in the boards. Yawning hell waiting down there. Bit of loose skin on the edge of his lip makes for an enticing little diversion and he gnaws at it with his front teeth. Is that all?

There was also _Beth._ Her name like a sunflare. Arcing out and blasting itself toward his magnetic field. There was _her,_ but she wasn't there. Not for a while. She was gone. That's why the hospital happened. Isn't it?

(His memories prior to his untimely demise are of course fractured and badly incomplete; accordingly, the full sequence of events that led him to that hallway frequently elude him. He remembers that he found her but not always the details of how, and the elements of planning and engagement that preceded the exchange flicker on and off like a loose bulb. He recalls the final night with her, chasing the car, and the seconds prior to the bullet with perfect clarity, at least most of the time. At any given moment, everything else is up for grabs. This is especially maddening because it makes an already meaningless death seem even more meaningless when he can't remember the greater context of why he was there to die at all.)

Yeah, that's why it happened. They were there to get her back. Gently, very gently. Patient, but not extravagantly so. Simple. He wants to slam the broken fragments of Rick's nose up into his brain and he doesn't want to do that and he wants _not_ to do it, and he wants to not want it, and he has no idea what he wants and it makes him want to fucking scream, so at least that's something he's sure of. But Rick is so patient with him, and still hasn't made him leave.

That's all of them, too. Except Tyreese and Noah. Does he remember them?

He does. Noah was a useless little prick and the world isn't poorer for his absence.

Beat of silence. He rubs his left heel against the wood, feels the faint roughness of the grain. It's pleasant. Too bad about Tyreese, though.

Very quiet: Yes, it is.

But unsurprising. People like Tyreese can't live. Not in this world. Not that _anyone_ can live in this world, not for any truly extended period of time, but people like Tyreese are the first to go. _She_ was wrong and he was right: the good ones don't survive. They don't survive because they won't do what it takes to survive. Out there on the road - a _good person_ would never have done the things he did. So a _good person_ would never have made it this far. Not that he did _make it,_ but for a given value of life he's technically alive.

Looking at Rick now. The Baby's eyelids are drooping as Rick strokes his long fingers through its wispy hair. Rick's face is difficult to read. Set of his mouth, thin like it is - that could mean a number of things. Likewise the brittle brightness in his eyes.

Does Rick understand what he's saying? If anyone can, it should be him. _You pretended for a while._ Don't you remember that, Rick? You and that fucking baby. You put your gun away and you played house, played farmer and family man, let everyone else get their hands dirty while you got them covered in nice clean soil, and pretended you were a _good person._ Worked out great until it didn't anymore, and then you got yourself a machete with a red handle and started ripping people's throats out with your teeth.

 _Looked at you then, all bloody, and I didn't think I would ever do anythin' like that. Don't think I was judgin' you. I wasn't. But I didn't know._

 _I didn't know what I could do._

Only pretended but for a while he believed. Or wanted to so badly that he made himself believe he did.

Now they're all here. All those names he remembered. Recovered, found. He'll lose them again, but the people will still be here, and the ones who are gone will still be gone. Tyreese died because he was a good person. Noah… He doesn't know the details but he would imagine Noah died because he was weak. The rest of them…

None of them are good people. Because they're alive.

Not even Beth.

It's blasphemy, oh my _God_ it's such unforgivable blasphemy, and he should cut his own skin to ribbons for even thinking it, offer his own tainted blood in a fruitless bid for absolution. But it's also true. He doesn't even have to call her a pathetic cunt and a stupid little bitch to arrive at that conclusion. He understands that now. Or at the moment he does. Might lose it like those names, but for now he understands: Beth can't be much better than he is.

But no, she's perfect. She's _flawless,_ she's brilliant, she's the source of scalding, unbearable light that nevertheless is kind to him. She's grace embodied. She's mercy. She condescends to be with him and she says she _loves him,_ kisses him and allows him to put his hideous hands on her, and he can't begin to comprehend how that's true, and all he can do is fall to his knees and try to find a way to accept her blessings.

No, she's not. Weary. She's not a goddess and she's not a bitch.

She's just a person.

And she's not good. Because she's alive.

Silent again. No longer looking at Rick. Not really looking at anything. It occurs to him to wonder how much of that he said aloud, how many of those tiny pointless revelations he just related.

How much of himself he let Rick see.

Someone passes by on the street. Doesn't know him. Young man, brown hair, nondescript face. He waves, little flick of the hand. Rick lifts one in return. The breeze shifts, and the sickeningly sweet odor of decay drifts to them on it, not strong but unmistakable. Once he couldn't smell it because it was all he smelled. In the air. On himself. Covered himself in their guts and blood and soggy flesh to move among them without fear and simply never bothered to wash it off, because why would he?

He was pretty much one of them anyway.

And Rick says he's right.

He watches the man disappear. Voices somewhere. Laughing. Back inside, the dull, tuneless chime of dishes in the kitchen. A door shutting. And Rick says he's right, very low. Barely audible. He's right about all of it. He's been right most of the time since he walked in the gates. None of it's pleasant, no one here wants to hear it, but he's right.

Good people don't live.

In the church, Rick says. Does he remember how he went after the car with Carol? Into Atlanta? Some of it, yes. Bits and pieces. He remembers that it happened. Well, he might also remember that while he was gone, the survivors from Terminus came to visit, and the group took care of them.

Not with guns.

There are things Rick didn't tell him.

 _Got the leader on his knees. I said I was gonna kill him, when he had us. You remember that? With the machete. Figured I should make good on it._ Rick lowers his face, presses his lips to the crown of his baby daughter's head, and the world drowns in a sea of blood. A tsunami pouring over the walls. It rises and submerges them, and he can't see anything but red.

 _I made good on it. I hacked him to pieces. I didn't have to do it like that. I did it that way because I wanted to._ Pause. Eyes half closed, his face visible even through the red. _I liked it. I… enjoyed it._

He turns his head then, cool blue irises like circular chips of ice, and there's no urge to hit him. No urge to grab him by the hair and slam his face against the top step, against the banister. No urge to lunge at him and snap at his throat.

No urge to break his daughter's neck.

This might be the most honest Rick has ever been. He can appreciate that. Brutal honesty is of the very few things he can still appreciate, because he can appreciate the honesty of brutality in general.

He takes a breath full of rotting meat and the boards creak and groan and strain under the weight of all these lies, and the heavier truths.

 _I know._ Gaze falls to the Baby again. Asleep now. So small and fragile. Once he wanted to protect that fragility. He remembers that too. He saw it and he wanted to place his body between it and whatever wanted to do it harm. He wanted it with a fierceness he's rarely felt about anything.

Now he feels nothing except a very dull and blurry species of horror, mingled with bitter contempt. For it and himself and the whole fucking world of human beings who no longer belong here.

 _You're gonna watch your daughter die. You're gonna watch her die screaming and there's gonna be nothing you can do to stop it. She might make it another year. Maybe two. But sooner or later it's gonna happen._

 _If it's not me it'll be someone else._

 _Babies don't get to live either._

He gets up without another word and walks down the steps, into the grass and onto the pavement. As in the moonlight he feels pleasure in the transition from cool soft blades to a rougher surface already warming in the sun. It's not high yet and the shadows are substantial. He can walk without fear, just like he did among the walkers. Or he can pretend that he doesn't have to be afraid, and maybe he'll do it as well as he did when he was pretending he might be good. Because he's not good, and he does have to be afraid. All the time.

Of everything.

He starts down the street and he feels like he's moving in a dream. He might as well be, for as real as everything here is. The world is a bright indistinctness. Nothing is falling. Nothing is burning. Nothing touches him except the receding tide of blood lapping at his ankles.

He feels Rick's gaze on him until he turns the corner and is gone.

* * *

So many times on the road he forgot himself, forgot his aching body and throbbing head and blistered feet, his frequent small wounds and his occasional large ones, let his legs carry him forward on a plodding kind of cruise control and allowed his mind to float away. Not to anywhere in particular. Nowhere to fucking go. Just _away._ Not like he did a great job of keeping it in place anyway, and it was such a relief to stop trying.

It came roaring back when the monotony broke. But the breakage was almost always other people. Walkers he learned to avoid with a completely unconscious instinct. Avoid or kill, but again: after he was caked with a permanent layer of filth of a sufficient thickness, they mostly left him alone.

More than once he came at people from within a pack of walkers. Staggered along, blended in, lunged when he got close enough. His speed and vicious ferocity caught them by surprise and killing them was usually easy.

Killed. Took things if they had anything to take. Blended back into the dead, or into the trees and the shadows. Where he belonged.

Now he slips into that same autopilot and drifts down one street, another, and is only dimly aware of where he's going. Not Aaron and the bike. He took another direction, turned left instead of right, and ahead of him he sees the rising walls and the heavy chainlink of the gate. People moving along the top, standing with guns. He knows they're watching him. Doesn't give a fuck as long as they leave him alone.

Wonders if they know who he is, though. Sort of. Doesn't _care_ but wonders.

There's the gate. The patch of pavement where Rick tackled him, took him down. That's another thing he no longer remembers clearly, except for the pain of the impact, the air slammed out of his lungs, yells, weight of Rick on his back - inconsequential, because _she_ was there, she was staring at him, she saw him and her sight brought him forward into a state of total reality, hauled him those last few steps into whatever poor excuse for life he has now. She was there and he had to reach her, embrace her or murder her or fall to his knees at her feet, and he _did_ fall.

Screams tearing at his throat with hooked claws, and awful sobs dry and fleshless as famine.

He feels like there should be a stain here. Something to mark it, that passage. Like he was born. Again, the thought of wrestling his way out of the afterbirth, blood-smeared and gasping for air his lungs weren't made to breathe.

She delivered him.

He turns and allows his feet to carry him toward the grass.

He's looking at it for a while before he understands what he's seeing. The sun falls across it - brighter now, and it's going to be a harder job getting home through the obstacle course of light, but he'll manage somehow. He's done it before. In any case, the sun is doing its strange work on shadows and shapes and the interpretation of his uncooperative eyes, and he sees without seeing. He sees without without making sense of it. There's the flat slab of a wall and there are lines and curves and forms, but they mean nothing.

Signify nothing.

Then he's standing in front of them, and they do.

Names. Lots of names. A litany of them, none of them familiar, and even if they were he's not entirely certain how much he would care. But the _why,_ as he scans them - that he does know. That, he's certain of. Because in the end names are all you have, and though it's stupid and pointless and comes to nothing in the end, though it's its own odd species of obscenity in the face of a world of senseless death, people hold on. People remember.

He remembers. Or he tries. On his knees on the floor, crumpled papers in his bleeding hands and more surrounding him, he still tries.

 _Tara Eugene Abraham Rosita Sasha Gabriel._

 _Rick Michonne Carl Judith Carol Glenn Maggie._

 _Beth._

And gone, crossed out with thick black Xs: _Tyreese Noah._

Saying them one at a time, to himself, lips moving silently. There's no fucking point to any of this. The very presence of these names is offensive, somehow even more offensive than this whole fucking place. When it finally burns, crumbles and falls, he hopes this wall goes first. Hopes the names blacken into flaking carbon. Gone forever. Gone like they should be.

He knows without having to search that his own name isn't there.

 _Good._ When he's gone, nothing of him should remain.

Nothing left where it doesn't belong.

He's no longer paying attention, fallen back into that blank forgetfulness of self, when he finally walks away.


	29. cut you like you want me to

I said I wouldn't offer too much warning regarding exactly when the ending is coming, and there are a number of reasons for that. I will say, though, that I think we're moving into the final _block_ of chapters. Exactly how many chapters that block will consist of remains to be seen, but pieces are moving into place. I mean, they have been since the beginning, but yes.

For what it's worth, this is shaping up to be yet another one I'll be sad to finish (not that it's not very sad to write). Thank you for still being here. ❤️

 **Chapter 29: cut you like you want me to**

 _I'm battling monsters, half-monkey, half-tarantula, I'm pulling you out of the burning buildings and you say_ I'll give you anything. _But you never come through._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She's cleaning her rifle when Rick comes to her.

She usually does this in her room, and she's doing it there now. It's meditative, almost soothing, like sharpening her knife but even more so. All the pieces, the repetitive motion, the way dis-and-reassembly familiarizes you with the shape and form of a thing in a way simply looking and holding never could. She claimed this rifle from the armory when she claimed her place on the wall, lifted it and felt the weight, the way it fit in her hands and against her shoulder, the way the scope fit her eye. It was the second she examined, and she didn't have to look at a third. She just knew.

She knows it the way she imagines he once knew his bow.

They dropped it. Left it behind. Some days she thinks that was better. Some days she would give almost anything to have it back. It was too heavy for her to really use effectively, though maybe she would have gotten strong enough for it with time, but even so.

Today she's not thinking about the bow. She's not thinking about much of anything. Then she looks up, and Rick is standing in the doorway.

He doesn't look happy.

She looks down again, her eyes half lidded. The movements of her hands don't stutter. Nothing about his unhappiness - the tight line of his mouth and his jaw, his narrowed eyes - indicates that some kind of immediate disaster has occurred. It's quieter and deeper, looming on the horizon of his expression like a stormcloud.

"What?"

"Daryl talked to me this morning."

She grunts. There are any number of things that could mean, and though clearly whatever Daryl said is troubling him, she refuses to worry about it yet. She loves Rick, loves him wholly and fiercely, but she also doesn't really give a shit about what he thinks. Not unless she has no choice.

Rick releases a hard breath, tilts his head. "What're you doing with him?"

Her chin and gaze snap up together. Her hands still don't stop, remain steady, but everything inside her chills. Also hard, also a snap. This is not unexpected. Though aside from the night Daryl came to her room, she hasn't given it a lot of thought. What the others might think about this. What they might say. What kind of additional and profoundly unhelpful shit she might have to deal with, from them.

This is fucked up, _she's_ fucked up, she has been for months, and they can't help her.

"How's that any of your business?"

"It's my business 'cause I'm trying to hold this fucking situation _together._ "

He steps through the doorway, glances back as if he's afraid of being overheard, pulls the door closed behind him. That in itself will probably make whoever is here wonder about things, but oh fucking well; they're probably wondering anyway, and right now she has Rick Grimes to contend with. He's coming toward her, and he stops in front of her, towering, features drawn. "He's living under my _roof,_ Beth. I'm trying to _keep_ him there. He's already up and down like a goddamn roller coaster, now this?"

She sets the rifle aside, slowly gets to her feet and regards him with all the coldness she feels. "What d'you think _this_ is?"

"Are you fucking him?"

His head jerks to the side as she slaps him.

Her palm stings with it, bright tingling sparks of pain. It's like the pain itself rings off the walls, ricochets back to her, and she accepts it with a grim kind of pleasure. It _should_ hurt.

It should hurt her too.

He stays like that for a few seconds, face turned to the wall and eyes closed, as if processing what she's just done. Then he raises fingers to his mouth, touches his lip, and as he turns back to her she sees the bright blood smearing them and feels a satisfaction as grim as the pleasure, even as her gut coils into nausea.

" _Are_ you?"

"Go to hell." She bends and picks up the rifle, sets it down on the bed and starts to clear away the rest of the stuff. Before her eyes leave his face, she glimpses a dark smear of grease against the oozing blood at the corner of his mouth. "Go the fuck to hell, Rick."

"I need to know."

"Why?" As if it matters. As if she cares. But it comes out anyway, and before she can take it back he's answering her.

"He's fucked up and you know it, and you know you're a big part of why."

She freezes still facing away from him, greasy hands clenched at her sides, staring blankly at the window. Ghost of a palm print; it hasn't been replaced since she wiped it clean, but she can see it anyway. She can see it, and it's like it pushes through the glass and drifts to her through the air, strokes cool and bloodless over her face. Her hair.

Closes over her throat.

 _Yes._

"He would be plenty fucked up without me," she murmurs.

"Yeah. He would. But this is the worst part of it." His voice is shaking, she notes. Not much, barely perceptible in fact, but it's there, and she knows: he's scared. This is sliding out of his control, or it's becoming piercingly clear to him that he never had any control over it to begin with, and fear is washing in to replace the space the control - or its illusion - left empty. "He's dangerous. You know that too."

"Then make him leave."

" _Beth._ "

She doesn't know when she last heard him sound like that.

That's what gets her to turn, to look at him. Meet his eyes again. They're stricken, _agonized,_ and it's not fear that's gripping him. It's brutal terror, the terror of a man stuck on the railroad tracks and facing down a shrieking, oncoming train.

"I _can't_."

"I know," she whispers, and all at once she wants to cry. She wants to close the foot or so of space between them and press her face into his chest and cry, and it wouldn't make her feel any fucking better but it would be _something,_ because out of all of them, except maybe Carol, he's the only one who even _kind of_ gets it.

Like her, for him.

"I can't go through that again." He lifts his hands and swipes them roughly down his face, ducking his head as he does. No tears, not for him, but she knows they're lurking behind the last shreds of composure. He didn't cry as hard as she did - or she doesn't remember him doing so, though in fairness there's a lot she doesn't remember - but the tears were blinding him when he shot Dawn and streaming down his cheeks when he stumbled back and almost crumpled, head falling to the side and the gun shaking in his hand even as he kept it aimed at a woman who was no longer there, and for a few awful seconds she glanced up, did it as she was reaching for Daryl's bloody head, and met his eyes.

Knew part of him was dead too. Watched it die.

"You think you can stop that from happenin' if you pretend he's not dangerous?" Not coldly. Curious more than anything. What coldness she feels then is scorn turned inward.

 _You're one to talk, you stupid bitch._

 _Except no. You_ know _he is, yeah. And apparently you don't give a fuck. You're lying down underneath him and waiting for him to kill you._

"I think I can try to keep it from getting _worse._ "

"I'm not fuckin' him," she says quietly. Because there's no reason not to tell him, even if it's none of his goddamn business, and there's no reason she shouldn't be merciful to him when it comes to this. Right here, right now.

"But he's in love with you."

She nods. Again: no point in denying it. It's not even a question. Whatever Daryl said to him, it must have been obvious, and he's not looking for confirmation from her so much as making it clear that he knows.

"You think it was somethin' I did?" Still very quiet. Still no trace of warmth. She might be merciful to him inasmuch as she'll be honest, but she's not comforting him. Not interested. Kinship in this case does not necessarily include kindness. "You think I _led him on?_ "

The anguish is back in his eyes as he makes a helpless little twitch of his hands, like he wants to grab something. Hold onto it. Her, maybe. " _Shit,_ Beth, of _course_ not."

"Then why the fuck are you talkin' to me like I can do anything about it now?"

"I'm not. I'm just." He rakes his hands into his hair and closes his eyes for a moment. She watches him, watches the slow in-out of his breathing as he tries to suck calm into his lungs, and she crosses her arms over her chest because letting her hands hang loose feels almost hazardous. As if she needs to curl inward, defend herself from something.

Not from him.

"I don't know what to do," he whispers finally, his voice breaking at the end, and all of him seems to go limp, and she uncrosses her arms and goes to him, wraps them around his middle and does the holding on for him.

He tenses. Uncoils. Folds his arms around her and lays his cheek against the top of her head and lets out a huge, shuddering breath.

 _If we had done this then._ She leans her forehead against his breastbone, squeezes her eyes shut and bites down hard on her lip. Maybe she can make herself bleed to match him. _If we had done this then, instead of keeping our distance, would it have been any better?_

 _Would it be better now?_

"I don't know, either." She releases her own breath, not trembling quite as badly as he is. Somehow. "I don't know if there's anything _to_ do."

"He'll die out there."

"He could die in here just as easy." _Easier, maybe._

"Why the fuck did he even _live_ then? If it was gonna be this bad? What the fuck was the _point?_ " That brokenness is running through every syllable now, every consonant, and she knows without having to ask or verify that she's seeing and hearing something he's kept locked away for longer than she's been fucked up. For longer than the time since Grady. Longer than the time since the prison fell. And she thinks of a horribly frightened man stumbling into the farmhouse with tears glistening heavy in his eyes, shaking and nearly hysterical, and a little boy who almost died.

Not just that terror, the same terror she's seeing now. Desperate confusion. Bewilderment. A total inability to fully believe what was happening.

Helplessness.

That never went away. He just _put_ it away. Locked it up, when he perceived that one way or another, it could get him killed.

Maybe Michonne has been allowed to see it. But she's not so sure, and she doesn't think it has anything to do with trust, because Rick trusts Michonne with everything he can. He has to. He's still capable of loving someone that way. She's just not so sure he's allowed that to _himself_ before now.

"He asked me that. Why he came back."

"What'd you say?"

That book in his hands. _The Stranger._ The one she hadn't liked, when she read the part of it she saw. _Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he._

 _It was because of me_ , she almost says, and that's _such_ bullshit, except when she answered him she had been talking about what drove him. Why he survived this long. The devil at his heels. She hadn't been talking about a purpose. The idea that she might be any kind of _purpose_ for him is nightmarish.

Especially because she suspects that for him, that's exactly what she is. In the best and the worst ways possible.

Rick's heart is gentle thunder in her ears. She sighs. "There's no point. He just did."

And if he dies?

If he dies - again - there won't be any point to that either. It'll simply happen, and he'll be gone, and maybe in the end not much will have changed. He knows it. He told her. He told her, and in the most matter-of-fact way possible. As if it didn't even bother him very much.

 _God, Beth. Please survive. Please. But don't trick yourself into thinkin' it means anything._

She feels Rick shake his head, firm - though not the kind of firmness that accompanies real conviction - and he holds her tighter. "I can't… No. He survived a bullet to the fucking head. There's gotta be _some_ kind of reason."

"Rick." She leans back, still hugging him, and gazes up at him for a moment, lifts a hand and cups his face. Rick is no religious man, she knows that, and never has been. She's never heard him speak favorably about _any_ kind of higher power - not that he's dead set against the idea of one, but that if one exists, he wants nothing whatsoever to do with it. But speeches about how _we are the walking dead_ aside, he's the kind of idiot who might want to believe something like this. He's the kind of idiot who might want the world to make some form of sense. Even if he knows better.

She sympathizes. Completely.

"What?"

Blood wet at the corner of his mouth. She wipes it away with her thumb, like a tear. "There doesn't have to be any fuckin' reason at all." The smile that pulls at her lips is hideous, she doesn't want to be wearing it, and she can't make it stop. It feels like a death mask. "He just got unlucky."

"I can't lose him again. I can't." He swallows, and actual tears are glittering in his eyes. He won't let them fall. She knows that. He's a stubborn man, in every way. "Can't lose you either."

 _You already did._ She drops her hand. She has no answer to that. He's not expecting one. But it pierces her, and she should have one. She should have _something_. An empty promise that he knows she can't possibly keep, that would insult him if she offered it to him. _You won't._

So instead she releases him, steps back, and they look at each other, and the sheer helplessness that crashes down between them almost knocks her to the ground and stands on her chest and crushes the air out of her.

"What if he kills you?"

The question is nearly inaudible, barely even a breath behind it, as if he thinks it'll come true if he says it aloud. The opposite of how wishes are supposed to work.

She shrugs. That smile again, and it hurts, because it comes from the deepest part of her. Like a piece of her ripped out, bloody and ragged, trailing strings of flesh. Held out to him like something he might want.

"Then I guess we'll be even."

* * *

She's sitting outside in the last of the evening light when he crosses the street to her.

He comes without hesitation, out through the door and down the steps and onto the pavement in his bare feet - and as she watches him, it occurs to her then that since he arrived, she's seen him with his feet bare just as often as she hasn't, as if he's stopped caring about shoes. As if in this insanely soft world behind the walls, he doesn't feel like he needs them.

If anyone in the world understands how to eliminate everything that isn't absolutely necessary at any given moment.

To him, she has always been necessary.

He comes to her and he stops at the foot of the steps and stares silently up at her with his bandaged hands loose at his sides. His eyes were shadowed but as he raises his head the light catches them and then fills them, and they're dark - but somehow also clear.

It's _him_.

This is why it's hopeless. She wants to jam her fists against her mouth to muffle the scream coiling up inside her throat. There's the monster inside him, the nightmarish thing he sees stalking her, which she now understands is him and was from the beginning. And he's also stalking _himself,_ terrifying and tormenting himself like his teeth ripping at his hands, because what she's seeing now is just as much a part of him.

Still alive and still real. Still fighting. Beaten down and exhausted and in a universe of pain she can't even imagine, dragging himself through a hell-world he can't escape, and yet somehow he hasn't given up. Somehow he always keeps returning to her. He claws his way out of the dark for even just a few moments with her before it sucks him back down again.

The part of him that wants to devour her, to eat her alive… It never has to fight its way out. It comes and goes as it pleases. What she's seeing now is here because he fought himself, and he won. And he bought himself some time.

This is hopeless because she can't leave. She can't leave him alone. She can't abandon him to himself. She can't abandon him to that _thing._

 _Not again._

She holds out her hand without a word and he climbs to her, closes it awkwardly in his, sinks down on the step in front of her, and she cradles his head when he lays it in her lap.

He's warm. His hair is soft when she strokes it back from his face, more than usual, and after a few seconds she realizes that it's because it's freshly washed. Still tangled, but clean, and when she leans over him she smells the faintest trace of the soap he used. Not a smell she associates with him at all, and in fact there's something almost disquieting about it, but she gets it. Why, as clearly as if he told her.

He can't wash his mind. So this has to do. He clawed his way to her; this was a handhold he carved out of sheer rock.

A pair of mourning doves call somewhere close by. She can't hear any walkers. She hears someone behind her in the kitchen - probably Glenn - and the beat of the blood in her ears, and Daryl's rough breathing. Without meaning to, her fingers graze across his brow, and she pauses when she feels a tiny uneven spot. Crust of the scab.

Left side. Near his eyebrow. It's very fresh, like it has been almost every other time she's touched it. She squeezes her eyes shut.

He still won't let it heal. Even with the bandages on, somehow he still won't let it heal.

"I saw the wall," he whispers.

It takes her a moment or two to realize what he's talking about. Then she has no fucking idea what to say. Gazing blankly over his head at the pavement, the street, the lights coming on in the other houses, the shadows of the trees expanding to fill and make the oncoming night. Gazing to the left at where she knows the wall is, where it will be eventually if one begins to walk and keeps going for long enough.

So he did. He walked. He went back to the gate. Maybe elsewhere.

He's started pushing out into new territory. And knowingly or not, he's defying Deanna's conditions for his probation and going alone.

"My name wasn't there."

"No." Her voice comes out cracked, like she's forty or fifty years older. And so quiet like this, his voice has smoothed out, and he sounds so young. "We couldn't." She draws a slow breath. "I couldn't."

"Will you put it up there?"

She blinks down at him, jaw slack as if it's taken a blow. He _says_ things now, and they're so bizarre and so awful that sometimes she can't immediately credit her own ears, but somehow this is one of the worst, and she doesn't even know quite why.

"I don't need to. You're here."

He gropes for her, catches her hand and holds on. Tight. Nearly to the point of hurting her, but she's certain he doesn't want to. He's just clutching at her, clinging, and when he turns his head enough to look one-eyed up at her, again it comes to her - strangely - that she still hasn't seen him cry.

Not a single fucking tear.

"Will you?"

He's not talking about now.

"Daryl-"

"I didn't remember it for a while. My name. Sometimes I still… I ain't sure." His mouth wrenches to the side and relaxes again. His single visible eye is bright and very dry. "You know what it feels like to forget yourself?"

She shakes her head.

"It's like fallin' in the dark." His hand goes limp around hers. _Dead._ Before she can grip it, it slips away and lands on the step with a soft thump, fingers curled. "Please put it up there. Please."

 _There's no point._ She wants to say, but she can't. Somewhere between her brain and her mouth, a roadblock has been set up, and she can't break past. _You're going to outlive this place. It doesn't belong but you do. It'll burn to the ground and you'll be standing there in the ashes because you can't die, you_ can't, _not again, you sure as_ shit _won't die before this sick joke does. You keep saying it'll burn. What the fuck is the point of putting your name on something when it's only going to burn and you'll be alive anyway when it does?_

 _You're going to be the last man standing._

But she's been wrong about everything.

"Nobody's gonna forget you." She leans down and presses her lips to his brow - over that tiny patch of roughness, the broken place in him. "I promise."

He says nothing.

He's not an idiot. Like he said, he's brain-damaged but he isn't _stupid._ He knows it's bullshit. He's well fucking aware. It's just like it was with Rick, the things she wanted to say. She can't promise anything of the kind, and even if she keeps it for herself, even if Rick and Carol remember him for the rest of their lives, even if they _all_ do, _the rest of their lives_ very likely won't be all that long. And then?

He's just gone.

She keeps holding him. She keeps stroking his hair in slow, steady passes of her hand, gentle as she can be, and after a while she feels the rest of the tension slipping out of his muscles, but without the horrible limpness from before. The dusk deepens, more lights coming on, and when she hears a step behind her and glances over her shoulder she sees a silhouette standing behind the screen door - Maggie, watching her.

They all have to know. They must. Or at the very least, none of them should be surprised by now. That this man loves her with everything in him - and he _does._ Whatever other poison is in him, he does.

One more reason why she can't leave him alone.

They have to know she loves him too.

When she glances back again a few minutes later, the doorway is empty.

"I don't wanna be here when it happens," he breathes, and her hand stutters as she looks down at him. His eyes are open - the one she can see - and staring at nothing. Blank. But he's present in his voice. He hasn't been dragged back down. "When this place burns. I don't wanna watch you die. Don't make me watch you die."

All the things she could have said once. _You won't._ Not empty promises, but instead she would have truly believed them. That things would work out somehow. At the very least she wouldn't have made disaster her default assumption. She would have counseled _faith._ She _has_ , to this version of him, and she wasn't delivering platitudes.

But instead of speaking she bends low again and presses her forehead against his temple, kisses his cheek. His jaw. Once more kisses the little scab where the bullet tore him apart, and he whimpers softly when she does.

Something she can hardly bear to consider but also can't avoid, as she lays her head over his and rocks him very slightly, is that he might not be asking her for reassurance. He might not be asking for that at all. That this might be the thing he hasn't yet asked her for, but that part of her has been expecting. Expecting for a while. Dreaming it, over and over.

He might be asking her for a favor.


	30. and if I only could, I'd make a deal

**Chapter 30: and if I only could, I'd make a deal with God**

 _I'll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me 'cause I couldn't make you love me and I'm tired of pulling your teeth._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He wants to meet the others.

 _Meet._ Versus _see._ It's not seeing. They've never met him, and to him they might as well be strangers. The man they think they knew died in Atlanta, and by now the news must have reached them. This is not _him,_ this thing that crawled in through the gates. But this is the closest thing they're going to get. And he remembers them. Some. Stares at the wreckage of his filing system as frustration winds his nerves around a spiked pole. These things are _his,_ these voices and images, broken heaps of them. He can't have them back, not like they were, but he wants them. Wants whatever he can get.

It's fucking pointless and he hates that he does, but he does.

Faces. Real people to attach to the names he's recovered. Even if he only sees them for a few seconds, even if he doesn't speak to them at all - and probably that's advisable. Can't imagine what they'd want to say to him. Was never close to most of them anyway. They were never _family._ Wretched fucking parody of something worth anything, worst joke in the universe, _family_ is, but once it did mean something to him. Once it meant everything.

Him. The dead man.

Whatever.

Anyway, he wants to meet them. _Abraham Rosita Eugene Sasha Gabriel_ and he supposes that he's already met _Tara,_ even if the circumstances were far less than ideal. He wants to meet them, fucking _see_ them and have those faces to pin name tags on, and when he proposes this to Rick, Rick is clearly pretty dubious. Doesn't say as much, but clearly not sure he can handle it. Not sure he won't… What, Rick? What exactly are you so afraid of?

That he'll attack them? Lunge at them, rip their throats out with his teeth? Does that prospect worry you, _brother?_ Is that something you see happening, maybe with the kind of clarity very few other people would experience?

That he'll do something less problematic but still a serious fucking problem, like try to bite his own fingers off or gouge his own eyes out, or strip naked and shake his dick at them or piss all over the fucking floor? Is Rick worried the crazy man living in his house might start repainting the walls with his own shit if some new element is introduced into the situation?

Well? What's the problem, bro? What's the problem, you arrogant prick? What's the fucking _deal?_

Breathing hard. His voice was high, hard, _vicious,_ now quiet again. Looking at Rick, looking down at the kitchen floor. Away. Doesn't want to see what he sees there on Rick's face, doesn't want to know what he's just done, which is prove the whole fucking point. No, he won't do any of those things. Or it's remotely possible that he will, but that's not what Rick is worried about.

(He cannot now and possibly never will be able to articulate it, and is in fact not completely aware of it, but Denise's characterization of these furious derailments of his train of thought as _seizures_ was something of a turning point for him. It was not entirely a positive one. Instead of blaming himself for his literally insane rage, for his violent lashing-out at anyone and anything unlucky enough to be in close proximity to him, he now blames himself for not being able to control it. For being overtaken and overwhelmed by it. It comes on him like a milder version of the storms of agony in his skull, and by the time he realizes the full extent of its severity, he's lost in the middle of it and can only hunker down and wait for it to pass him by. The only possible mercy will lie in the minimization of the damage he does.)

He lost it. He lost control. Not like he ever fucking had it to begin with, and he clenches his jaw so hard his whole goddamn face aches, clenches his fists, clenches everything he can clench like its own kind of seizure, and there is absolutely nothing he can say to make this better.

 _I can be all right._

Bullshit. And everyone knows it. Because he keeps demonstrating it to them.

Rick says his name, softly, and it's like a slap in the fucking face.

 _Don't._ Him? He thinks he said it. Knows he did when he says it again, and it's low and broken and pleading, and he _hates_ it, Christ, he hates it so much, that word and his own voice and Rick for being here to listen to it, saying his name like that, oh my fucking _God_ Rick, _how can you not know what you've done to me._

Hands on his face in the dark, in his hair. Stroking. Slow. Gentle. Stroking him like peeling the flesh slowly and gently off his bones.

 _Don't. Just don't._ Shaking his head. Turning away. World lost in shadows that move like no shadows should move. Things wriggling in the corners. _Forget it. It's a stupid fuckin' idea anyhow._

Sigh behind him. Scuffle of a boot. _It's not a stupid idea._

He shouldn't stop. He does. At least he has the sense and the self control to not turn around, not face this fucking mess he's made. Stands there with his clenched fists at his sides and wills the rage away.

Feels like he's losing again.

 _I don't want you to get hurt._

What.

Whispers: _What._

 _You're doing better. I know you don't feel like it most of the time, but you are. You're doing better but yeah, something might go wrong - don't have to be a big thing - and you'll kill yourself over if even if it's no big deal. You'll rip yourself to shreds._

His hands. Both of them, thinking about his hands. Carol hasn't freshened the bandages today. He's decided that later he's going to strip them off and see how he's doing, and maybe he won't actually _rip himself to shreds_ this time. If he tries. Really tries.

He feels so goddamn sick.

 _You're gonna do better and then some days you're gonna do worse, and that's okay. You fuck up once, it doesn't mean you aren't doing better. It's only a day. But you don't get that. You fuck up once, you have a shitty day, you think it's over._

Hand on his shoulder, heavy and warm and strong. He seizes his own rising scream by the throat, throttles it. Being touched by anyone but _her_ -

But lying in the dark. Rick's hands, stroking, and so gentle. Didn't punish him for his considerable transgression. Eased him into sleep.

He sags under Rick's hand and bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds onto his tongue.

 _It's not that I don't want you to try. I just don't want you to hate yourself for something that isn't even your fault._

It's good logic. Solid logic. Recognizes that, sees the wisdom in it. Advisable. Safe. Better not to; he can't trust himself to get _any_ of it right, not just the external shit with them. Maybe hold off. Wait. Maybe he really will get better.

Except that's ludicrous. He knows it now, has always known except for the few scattered moments where he's able to fool himself. Rick is entirely full of shit. He's not getting better. He's not going to _get_ better. That's irrelevant when it comes to this: he wants to. He _needs_ to. Faces and names. All broken, shattered, and he's tired of cradling the shards in his bleeding hands and trying and failing to piece them back together into something that makes any sense at all. They cut him, punish him for his failure. It hurts.

He just wants faces and names. He just wants to know that they're real.

Just wants them to know that _he's_ real.

 _Remember._ Verb. Imperative. Do, must, can't. Request. Plea, desperate. _Remember remember remember._

If he sees them, he'll be more in the world. Still won't belong, but that's fine. He doesn't want to. What he wants is a tether, an anchor. Something else to tie him down, because he's not sure how much longer he can stay.

And he does want to say. Long as he can. Because of _her._

He jerks his body, his back, and Rick's hand falls away. Still doesn't turn. Can't look this man in the fucking eye, even now - _coward. Pathetic._ Doesn't matter. He is what he is and he does what he does, and what he does is say, in that same hoarse whisper: _I just wanna meet them. Doesn't have to be for long. I just wanna remember._

 _Help me remember._

Rick doesn't say no.

* * *

Maybe Rick should have said no.

He wasn't ready for this. He wasn't _equipped._ Sitting here on the porch - can't handle the living room, something about it that makes it difficult to breathe, something about it like the walls collapsing on him in thunderous slow motion - and watching them come to him as pilgrims, he wasn't really for this at _all._ Couldn't have been. There's no way to prepare for something like this. For being approached by people in a slow stream, wanting to behold you like a holy relic. There's no line or anything, they don't come all at once, and as he sits and smokes and tries not to skin himself alive, he wonders if maybe that would have been the better plan.

Unbearable either way, so probably it doesn't even fucking matter.

But he asked for this. Argued. Faces to go with his names. And in what feels like a nightmare procession of ghosts, a spectral parade, they come to him one by one and he sees them. One by one they come accompanied by swarms of beetles and wasps chittering and buzzing in the twisted voices of dead children, walking to him through pillars of flame, and one by one they look at him and he looks back and maybe at some point someone says something, and he retains none of it, because no: none of it matters.

None of this ever mattered.

Except no, no maybe: they say things, and he doesn't lose all of it. Some of it, he manages to keep.

Abraham is first, Abraham with Rosita, and they sit with him for a little while and the names come easy. He doesn't have to fumble for them. Doesn't have to tear through a wreckage of papers and files. Names and faces; he knows them. They were there the whole time. Now he's sitting on the floor of his mind and staring at them arrayed around him in a wide semicircle - dossiers. Photos and profiles. Biographical data, habits, identifying marks. All the tiny details he noticed, noted, filed carefully away. They're water-blurred now, the ink smeared, and here and there the words are mostly illegible, but he has them.

Cigarette trembling between his gauze-wrapped fingers. Deep inhale-exhale and the smoke floods black through his veins.

They say things. Abraham that he's a tough motherfucker, that it's incredible, awkward throat clearing and glancing away and murmured agreement from Rosita, that he's never seen anything like it, ever, that this is the kind of thing you hear about on the fucking news and you still don't believe it. More than murmuring from her then: that he's sitting right here. He's alive. He made it.

Not looking at his hands, neither of them. He knows it.

Doesn't hate them for it. He doesn't want to look either.

Not much else to say. Okay. It's so good to finally see him, see him doing all right. He needs to take care of himself. Focus on that. Nothing else matters right now.

See him soon. Yes. Goodbye.

Eugene. Eugene talks too fucking much and it makes his head hurt worse, but he bears it, because he recognizes what it is - this also in the dossier. Eugene talks a lot no matter what, fuck of a lot, but Eugene talks especially much and especially fast when he's nervous, and right now Eugene is frightened and probably wishing he hadn't come alone.

And this is very understandable and not in any way blameworthy.

So whatever Eugene actually says is lost in the torrent of his own words, and then lost in the bellowing of the flames beneath them and the screams of enormous crows as they wheel and circle, and it's better to lean over his knees and close his eyes and mutter something about how his head is hurting - yes, he can be honest about that, why the fuck not, he's too tired to lie and too bad at lying - and Eugene can go. Just wanted to see him. That's all.

 _Can_ equals _should._ Eugene goes.

He hauls himself into the house, slumps onto the couch and takes the pills Carol offers him. Gulps water. Tips his head into her gentle hands and ignores the thing crouching in the corner, scythe-claws clicking on the hardwood and tongue unrolling all covered in congealed blood, cheerfully waiting for its moment.

 _I hate you._

Back to his room. Sleep for a while.

* * *

He knows he dreams. He doesn't know what about. He knows it's bad, knows he wakes up with the storm still growling between his ears and even the light through his curtains too pulsingly bright and laced with hideous rainbows, knows his gut is still twisted into whatever knots the dreams tied it into, and he rolls over and stares into the spare gray dimness of his room and shivers and knows - _knows_ \- that he's awake. Perceives the division between dream and reality and knows it to be true.

(Upon waking, he consistently passes through a period between five and ten minutes in duration during which he is unable to tell the difference between the dreams he left behind and the world in which he's reclaiming consciousness. These minutes are in many ways far more dreadful than his dreams, however soaked in dread the dreams may be, because in the dreams there is certainty, at least of a kind. Lying in that twilight-state, his ghosts seething all around him, he wishes he was dead with a species of intensity he feels at almost no other time. Not that the intensity is greater, but merely that its very quality is different. Softer. Yet deeper.)

(Three times in his life prior to this one - twice as a child and once as an adult shortly before the world ended - he experienced sleep paralysis. The airless impossibility of motion and something tall and dark and red-eyed standing over his bed and watching him. Whispering to him, terrible things that might be done to him and that he might do. Telling him what he was, which was nothing. Worse than nothing. That he was worthless, that he was dirt, trash, shit, and would never be anything more.)

(If he could recall these instances now, he would regard them as dress rehearsals.)

But now he knows, and he lies in the dimness and stares at the thing in the corner as it crawls out of its sack and rises to its hands and knees, head spinning, drags itself toward him leaving a smear of old blood behind. He is awake. He is awake, and this is not a dream. None of them are.

So real they can make you bleed.

He whispers, syllables slicing into his raw throat. _I hate you._

Laughter. Awkward, clumsy cavorting though it remains in a crouch, ropey muscles trembling with potential energy ready to go kinetic. _Oh, sweetheart. You pathetic little shitstain._ Drops a spindly clawed hand between its legs and strokes its thick, bobbing erection, cock speckled with scabs and open sores and weeping thin watery pus from the tip. _You don't hate me half as much as you're going to._

His shuts his eyes against it. Bares his teeth, though he doesn't snarl. Not sure why; maybe because it would be pointless, and at least today he's too weary to make a practice of things that have no point. But he understands what it is that's draining him so profoundly. Why the weariness at all.

Meeting people. Not fucking up. He's drawing on every reserve of strength he has, every jagged fragment of self-control. Shackling the rage, the hatred, the despair, binding them in chains he forged with his own broken hands. All three are there, but they're manageable.

For now. Because this is taking everything in him. Everything in him, for a few hours where he can be all right.

Not a lot of time left, then. He turns over, braces himself against the floor and shoves himself to his feet. He's not gentle with himself. There's no reason why he should be. Doesn't deserve gentleness, _you sick fuck,_ because for a fraction of a fraction of a second he sees _her_ laid out beneath the ruined thing and its bulbous, suppurating dick, legs spread so wide and her cunt glistening flushed pink, wet and ready. Hissing _Fuck me, Jesus fucking CHRIST, stick it in me already, stick your fat cock in my pussy and FUCK ME._

Laid out beneath him, and he's going to give it to her. What she's asking. _Demanding._ Because all he wants is to show her even a fraction of his monstrous love. Impale her on it.

Tear her apart from the inside.

Numbly he pads to the door, opens it, returns to the world without a look back. Though he can feel the thing's eyes on him. The eyes it in fact does not and never will have.

He shuts the door firmly behind him. It won't keep it out. But it might slow the thing down.

Slow the thing down enough for him to finish what he has to do.

* * *

He's hungry. There's an apple and he takes it when Carol offers it, takes it into his clumsy hands without a word and turns away, heads back out to the porch. The day began sunny but it's afternoon now and low clouds are rolling in, not thick and gray but thin and white, and instead of blocking the sun they soak it in, infuse themselves with it, beat it down on the world. It's a hard, brittle glare, and even though he's in the shade, he blinks out at it and every blink is the jab of a shining needle, and he considers calling this the fuck off, going back inside, huddling under blankets in the dark and maybe trying again tomorrow.

No. He doesn't have the luxury of banking on tomorrow. Tomorrow isn't a thing into which he can deposit any plans, any hope. Tomorrow his own mind might swallow itself again, and this will all be a hateful, vicious joke - actually wanting to _see_ these people he doesn't give a shit about and who never cared about him. Tomorrow he might be worse. A lot worse. Today he might be a little better. Rick might not be totally wrong about that. Most things, Rick is still full of shit, but maybe _that,_ temporarily _._ It's remotely possible.

So he needs to take today for what it is. As if it's all he's going to get.

Ever.

And he still can't bear the house itself. Not for this, not for the control he needs to retain at all costs. Bleeding walls and raw, skinless things in the corners, making their own tomorrow-plans for tomorrows that will probably belong to them.

He lowers his head and screws his eyes shut, gripping the apple between his aching hands, and then Sasha is there.

Sasha lost Tyreese. It's in her dossier. Tyreese was good and she lost him, and Sasha was always pretty good too, and he knew her before and she knew him, and all of this might be why she's staring at him in silence, her eyes dark and drenched with pain.

He came back. Tyreese didn't. The universe picked one over the other. Or so it must seem to her.

He intuits this in seconds, feels good about the conclusion. It's irrational for her to hate the fact of his survival even as she tries to rejoice with the others - to the extent that they even have been - to resent it and be angered by it in the coldest, sickest way, but he knows all about furious irrationality and all about the kingdom it rules with endless iron fists. Could make topographical maps of it in his sleep.

He gets it. Meets her gaze levelly. Still holding the apple, he glances down at it. Turns it over in his hands, watches that brittle light shine on glossy red. The bandages are coming loose at his fingertips. Once Sasha is gone he'll strip them off and see what he sees.

 _I'm sorry,_ he says, before she can say anything - and maybe she wasn't going to. Maybe she has no idea what the fuck to say. _That you lost him. That's bullshit. That's just… fuckin' bullshit._ _He deserved better._

Eyes snap back up to her. The movement hurts - his whole head hurts, hurts like he doubts will go away, and tonight might be very bad though at least he'll have time to prepare - but the sheer act of connection doesn't wreck him. It doesn't stab him with rusty knives, doesn't saw at his nerves. Her keen eyes, strong slender frame, crossed arms in solid stance - suddenly feels like maybe it was a shame he didn't know her better before, though he knew her well enough. A shame, because he won't get to now.

Then again, it's less for both of them to lose.

 _You wouldn't want him back like this._ Speaking calm. Unwavering. Flat. In terms of emotion, there is none. Not about this. This is stone-fact. Objective. This is something to be regarded with passionless attention and equally passionless analysis. Like life. Like death. Signifying nothing other than itself. _Trust me. You wouldn't. He came back like this, you'd be better off puttin' a bullet in him second you saw him._

 _So would he._

Her mouth twists, sharp and sideways as if it's trying to rip itself free from her face, and he knows he's hurt her. He feels only the vaguest pleasure at this, at the power it represents to him, and as pleasure goes it's a dry whispery shell of a thing. Useless. The last twitch of a dying muscle. Hurting her means little, because he doesn't care enough about her for it to bear much in the way of meaning.

Regardless, he has.

 _Yeah,_ she says, very softly. Very coldly.

Glittering flies swirl around her in clouds as she turns and walks away.

* * *

Last is the priest.

Late afternoon but the ruthless light hasn't dimmed, and it's a dull chorus of bells striking the insides of his skull over and over. Every cell in him is crying for darkness, for shadows, for cool air across his face and neck, the harder cool of a tile floor. Go into the bathroom and crawl out of his clothes, fill the tub with cold water, curl up in it and doze. Cold slows his blood. Slows everything.

Washes everything away.

Which he could use. Because half an hour after Sasha left, after the apple was reduced to a core and tossed into the bushes, he carefully unraveled his bandages and took the first real _look_ at his hands in days. Because glimpses caught between redressings don't count. Now he examines. And he doesn't let himself look away.

Infected finger is barely infected anymore, swelling almost entirely gone. Other scabs older, shrinking, surrounded by new pink skin. A few unnecessary and flaking off. Some parts of his nails are growing back.

But it's horrible. Even if they all heal, there will be scars. Scars innumerable. Every scar on his body, concentrated on the skin of his hands. Long as he lives, he'll look at them and never be able to forget what he did. Neither will anyone else.

 _They'll see this and that's all they'll see._

Running his fingertips over the back of his other hand - the roughness of the scabs making his mouth water. Belly wrung by two cruel and unseen grips. It would feel so good. Peel them off, bite, chew. Dig deeper trenches with what fingernails he has left. Uneven skin around his cuticles, more scabs - gnaw those off too, until the creases around his nails flood with red. Clip his jagged nails back to the quick and further, ill-fitting things he has to remove. It would hurt so fucking bad and it would feel so fucking _good,_ like someone finally climbed off his chest and he can _breathe._

Blood dripping from his fingertips and pain shivering up his arms and relief like he could never hope to describe pumping through every neural pathway, sparking between every cracked synapse.

Thing down there at the bottom of the steps, standing, watching him. Blood-rust razorblade grin, claws dragging slowly down its own chest, maggots wriggling through the gaping holes in its skin. Head-tilt. Interest. Amusement.

 _Go on. Fucking do it._

Grits his teeth. His are sharp too. He knows this from personal experience. He's tested them on people, many times by now. _No._

 _It's adorable how you think you won't. Look at you. Scared sad little boy trying to be brave, pissing the bed. Look at you, look at those things. That's_ you. _Right there. Them. That's what you are._

Actual smile, through his gritted teeth. Awful smile, wrenched, twisted. Knows it looks like a scream. Feels like a scream. If he did scream now he's not sure he would ever stop. _You're me too._

 _So? What, like that makes it_ better _, you retarded pus-bag? Look at_ me _then._ Spreads its claws, straightens its spine, and all at once it's taller, very tall, tall as the thing standing by his bed in the night and vomiting hatred into his ears. _I'm you, sure. You're having a nice conversation with yourself right now. Gold fucking star. You're those disgusting excuses for hands and you're also_ this, _and think about what that means. Think about_ everything _that means._

Wider grin. Blood and worms. The scream is coiling in the base of his throat, slipping into a soft whimper, and he's not going to be able to stop it.

 _Sooner or later you kill everyone._

Pain blasts the thing apart.

All at once in a single splattering explosion. Glistening wet pieces, spray of gore, ragged flesh and splintered bone, skittering claws and razorblades clattering to the front walk. And laughter, because of course this did nothing. Meant nothing. Infected finger between his teeth, blood seeping onto his tongue - all for nothing. He's just hurting.

It won't stop.

And the priest is standing there.

There's a cluster of blurry seconds during which he wonders how much the man saw, heard - how much of him was revealed. How blatantly and obviously he lost it. He only wonders for those blurry few seconds because he doesn't give a fuck. Gave a tiny bit of a fuck about _Abraham_ and _Rosita_ and _Eugene,_ even a little more about _Sasha,_ and he's pretty sure he would about _Tara_ , but this man…

This man is nothing to him. This man is nothing more than a face to go with his name, a dossier file to close and toss into a corner.

This man who clearly doesn't want to be here. Who would rather be anywhere else.

Which raises the question of why he is, and why he isn't.

Black getup, ridiculous collar. Could rip that collar off, shove it down his throat. See how far down it can go. Find a stick or something and keep shoving, packing it in like gunpowder. Keep on with it until he's choking to death on his own blood. Looking at him and considering this with a kind of reptilian smoothness, and that's when he knows he's out of time.

Little hand and big hand both on the twelve. Bullet chime. Midnight, so time to run home on broken glass shoes while our heads turn into rotting pumpkins. Split open, pulp and seeds everywhere, what a mess.

He almost giggles.

There is only one Daryl Dixon, and this is all he'll ever be.

Priest clears his throat. Voice all soft and quavery: Rick said he wanted to see him. Said he should come. Another cleared throat, step forward. Finding some wobbly cartilage to call a spine, are we. How cute. Can he help with something?

Is there something he can do? Counseling during recovery was never really his forte, small shaky smile, but he can-

 _Do you believe in God?_

Blink. The man - _Gabriel, Gabriel_ \- licks his lips. Nonplussed. What?

Very patient, because he's dealing with an idiot as well as a coward and he needs to remember that: _Do you. Believe. In God._

Well. Stammer. He. Yes. Yes, of course he does.

 _How about the Devil?_

Longer silence. Deeply unsettled. The priest isn't overtly looking around for escape routes, but it's easy to see the wheels turning. One glance up at the front door; likely hoping someone is inside, within earshot, if he yells for help. Don't worry, padre. Once again hard not to laugh. _The Word of God is the only protection you need, right?_

Wordless nod. He is frightening this man. This man he cares nothing whatsoever about - the first one of those he's seen in days. _Days._ First one he's been in close proximity to since the two he attacked the day he got here. Surges in on him, bright and hot, subsides and ripples like moonlight on inky water. What's possible. Things moving beneath the surface. Circling like sharks, counting him as distant prey.

He is _terrifying_ this man and the pleasure is incredible, like an orgasm in slow motion.

Or so he imagines. He hasn't had an orgasm in months. Maybe longer.

 _Do you?_

God is real. Yes. God is real and His Word is truth. Therefore the Devil must be real also.

So Heaven, then? Hell?

 _Yes_.

Long moment of silence. Let it sit, let him stew in it. Staring at him, unblinking, waiting for him to squirm at the edges. Wriggle like a hooked nightcrawler.

Doesn't happen.

That terrible light and this _insect_ of a man standing in it and staring up at him, fear a thick stench rising from every fucking pore, something pinned to a mounting board and should be wriggling but he's _not._ He's not wriggling. Not moving. _Nothing_. Just the fear, and in the end, how the fuck is fear satisfying when it remains behind a veneer of control?

How has he _won_ then?

And he wants to win. He fucking _needs_ to win. This piece of shit more than any of the others, because he doesn't give a fuck about him, but everything he represents, everything he is and does and means, the _obscenity_ that's coming out of his fucking mouth, all these lies about _goodness_ and _peace_ and _the resurrection of the body_ and _life everlasting_ and _hope_ and _faith,_ oh Christ _FAITH,_ he would break her neck for that lie _alone-_

Blood running down his fingertips, dripping with a soft _pat-pat_ on the wood.

 _Father, when everything finally goes to that Hell you believe in, I'm going to find you in your church and nail you up on your cross and jerk off while I watch you burn alive._

Doesn't say it aloud. Doesn't give a fuck about this man, but saying something like that… This man has no reason to lie for him. No reason to shield him and every reason to go blabbing to all the wrong people. He understands that his position here is highly tenuous. It wouldn't be good, to say a thing like that now and so obviously mean it.

Not like this.

Watching the blood drip off his fingers. _Go away._

No one wins.

When he looks up, he's alone.

* * *

She's coming to see him anyway, in the evening after her shift - no more extended periods of time away from him, not again, no matter how fucking dangerous it is - but when she's met at the door by Michonne, she knows something's up, and it takes only a cursory glance at Michonne's face to know that it's not good.

Not terrible. Not horrific. But not good.

Not that it seemingly ever is, with him.

"Headache again." Her mouth pulls into a grim line as she steps back, makes a path for Beth to enter. Judith is on her hip, head lolling and eyelids drooping sleepily, and Beth doesn't try to fight the instinctive urge to reach for her, touch her little hand even as her gut sinks.

"How bad?"

Michonne gives her half a shrug. "Bad. Think it's probably been worse, but it's still bad. Did what I could, got him his meds, but Carol is doing inventory and Rick is still out, and he doesn't respond so well to me sometimes, so…" Wan smile. "You got really good timing."

Beth releases a thin laugh. "Doesn't respond so well to _anything_ sometimes."

"Yeah. Look, if you-" Warm, strong hand on her shoulder, and a gentler tone, and keenly searching eyes. Michonne knows. Of course she knows. Everyone knows. "You don't have to do anything. You can get Denise, right before you got here I was going to-"

Michonne knows, and there's no anger. No worry. Not now. No time for either, and really she shouldn't be surprised, because when the rest of them are losing their fucking minds, Michonne perceives and moves through the world in terms of practicalities. What can be done. What should be done.

What should be let go.

She reaches up, covers that warm hand with her own. "It's okay." She swallows. "I can."

She's moving toward the hall, feeling through her core for the anchor she knows she'll need, but Michonne calls from behind her, still quiet, and halts her.

"He's out back."

 _Out back._ With a headache. With those things she doesn't think anyone could fairly call _headaches._ With his head smashing itself apart from the inside out, and he's made it very clear that anything except a small dark room is worlds of additional torment when they happen.

Now he's out back.

"He wouldn't go into his room. Usually he won't come _out._ He wasn't talking to me and I didn't know what to do, so I let him be." But Beth misses the last few words in the rush for the back door, her breath coming in hard gasps. What this could mean… Fuck, she has _no_ idea, and just when she thinks she has a hold of the sheer excruciating scope of this thing, she loses it all and is left floundering.

But it has to mean something.

Then she steps onto the back porch and sees, and she isn't thinking about what it means anymore.

He's not on the porch. The sun is in front of the house now, and back here a large patch of grass is thrown into deep, cool shadow. He's lying in the center of it, curled on his side just like he curls into his nest, but there's no pillows, no blankets, nothing to cover himself with. Just him and the grass, and he's soundless and motionless yards away from her, and looking at him like that, she knows he's dead.

He's not. God, he's not.

But part of her is so _sure._

Sure even when she sinks to her knees beside him and lays one hand on his shoulder and the other so gently over his head, and he stirs and turns slightly, his eyelids fluttering.

No moaning. No twitching or thrashing or screaming, no snarling that he hates her or sobbing that he loves her and he's sorry. Nothing but this minuscule movement, and stillness again as the breeze tugs at the wild strands of his hair.

Maybe it's not actually that bad.

"What're you doin' out here?" She smooths his hair back from his face, bent low. Braced on her elbows, nearly lying down next to him, close enough to kiss him if she wanted. "Why aren't you in bed?"

 _In bed._ His animal nest, a _bed._ That's a bad joke, and she thinks that for a fraction of a second he might actually almost smile.

When he speaks his voice is a whisper so soft she almost can't hear him at all. "Don't wanna be in there."

"Why not?"

But that's a profoundly stupid question. She knows exactly why not. She's seen it. She's spent hours in it. That room where everything is _wrong_ somehow, where none of the lines or angles quite make sense, where none of the shadows fall quite the way they should, where the light is like something out of a horror film. That lamp with its naked bulb. Those cavernous corners where anything might wait.

He doesn't answer. He simply releases a trembling breath and raises his equally trembling hands to his face, and she sees that they're bare, the bandages stripped away, and while they do look better, they're streaked with fresh blood.

They could be worse. Couldn't they?

"It hurts." Another whisper, just as soft. "Beth… It hurts so fuckin' _much,_ please…"

And he's groping weakly for her with those bloody hands, and that's when she realizes that there isn't any moaning or thrashing because it hurts too much for him to do either. His pain is literally paralyzing him. He can barely move, and it's not that he's lost in the gray water, exhausted by the weight of it and of himself. He can barely move because every movement is unbearable.

But he's trying.

"I can go get Denise. I can-"

" _No._ " The only force he's managed to put into his words yet - and not much of it. Desperation to convey desperation. It slams into her breastbone. "No. No. Stay."

All right. She'll stay.

She's bizarrely calm as she lowers herself to lie in the grass next to him, turns and wraps her arms around him and hooks a leg over his thigh. He's limp as she pulls him against her, head beneath her chin and her fingers combing into his hair, but he's warm and solid and alive, and those three things are the things she holds onto as she enfolds him. Between them, his hand twitches and makes a feeble attempt to grip her shirt before loosening again. His breath is coming in slow, shallow pulls, rough at the edges as if it's taking some effort, and just as she did the first night he came to her bed, she finds herself matching the rhythm as if she can guide him, lead him through each inhalation. Help him through the exhale.

She could say _it's all right_ but that's bullshit. Likewise _you'll be okay._ Any permutation of either. Anything along those lines. They both know better.

But she can tell the truth, especially if the truth is self-evident.

"I'm here," she murmurs, just as he releases his own words on one of those labored breaths.

"I love you."

 _Oh._

"I love you too." Her tears on his face, because if for some reason he can't cry, maybe she can help with that too. "I love you so much, Daryl. So much."

He makes a muffled sound she can't interpret, and goes silent, all boneless agony in her arms. She's carrying him, she thinks. Lifting him up and carrying him like he carried her when she wasn't walking fast enough for him, when really he just wanted to make her laugh and she knew it perfectly well, and she didn't have to force her laughter. She's carrying him through this, and if she can't make it go away, this might be the next best thing.

This might be everything.

 _Just a little further,_ she's thinking as she begins to sink into her own gray depths, shadows falling all around her like sunshine. Thinking it, and not knowing why. _Just the last little bit of the way._

 _You can rest soon._


	31. found the suicide asleep on the floor

**Chapter 31: found the suicide asleep on the floor**

 _This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She stays with him until it's fully dark.

She holds him. She sleeps, and he feels her sleeping and keeps a kind of sorry, useless watch and remembers when she slept by the fire, by all their fires, and he watched her then as she stirred and murmured in her dreams, bathed in dying red and gold, and it wasn't sorry or useless. It was worth something. He kept watch and kept her safe and it was good.

He could be good.

Then she wakes up and releases him and leaves him, and goes back across the street to her house, her world, and she stays there. She does this because - kind, merciful girl - he asks her to. Begs, quietly. The pain is still in him but it's a low drone, like his head is a hive full of sullen bees. Those wasps he sees now and then, black with stingers hooked wicked and dripping with venom. But now stingers blunted. Venom drying up. Just the buzz.

He thinks he'll be able to rest.

Not in there. Not in that fucking room. He doesn't want to go back there again - maybe not ever. That nest is not safe. No part of it is safe, no corner and no hidden space. His enemies are everywhere in that room, and even if he carries his enemies around with him every second of the fucking day, there's no reason why he should get cozier with them than he has to.

Not going back in there. No. Resolved to stand firm against anyone who tries to make him. As if he believed anyone might, but even so.

Doesn't tell her any of that. Sitting up in the dark, between the squares of light thrown by the kitchen windows, watching her walk to the back porch and go in. Watching her walk away from him and feeling an ache settling between his lungs, a softly closed fist around his heart. No violence this time, and he's frantically grateful for that.

Can ignore how she's a stupid cunt and a hateful bitch and useless and pathetic and weak and a manipulative little slut who toys with him because she has nothing better to do, ignore how he'd like to close his hands around her neck and dig his ragged fingernails into her throat until they punch through into her arteries and esophagus, ignore how he'd like to drown her in her own blood and vomit and bile. Can ignore all of that. Put it away.

Watch her and feel only that he loves her.

Feel that in her arms, before, he was safe. Could have been a lie. Probably was. But it seemed so true. Her love a shield. No magic, no divinity, no goddess dispensing hard justice from her mouth and hands. No unreachable, untouchable perfection.

She's a woman and she loves him.

Miraculous in and of itself.

As the moon begins to rise behind him, he lowers his head toward his knees and begins to lick the blood off his fingers.

* * *

Carol comes out, maybe an hour later. Carol is concerned, but maybe not as much as she might be. Asks him to come inside. When he shakes his head, she doesn't argue, and this comes as a mild surprise, though maybe out of all of them, she's the one he should be least surprised at.

She goes back inside. Returns with water, dinner on a plate - venison and roast potatoes and crisp green beans, and if he has a favorite meal that might count as one of them - and a blanket and a pillow under her arm. She lays these things down and he looks at them, looks up at her, and the _thank you_ he whispers comes without him having to think about it.

She sits down crosslegged in front of him and watches while he eats with his fingers, in his comfort zone such as it is, and as usual she offers no judgment. She's simply with him, washed in moonlight, and he gazes back at her in silence as he wipes his fingers on his shirt.

They hurt. But they don't hurt as much as they did. Nothing hurts as much as it did.

All around her, all around them in a wide circle, silent standing figures. Tall and slender and nothing more than inky silhouettes. Light falls into them and disappears. Can't see their eyes but knows they're watching him. Waiting.

This relative peace and relative lack of pain are a temporary reprieve. Nothing more. And when the horrors and the fire come for him again, they'll come with vengeance.

For what?

Many things. Take your fucking pick.

(He does not believe in justice. Yet he believes justice will find him. There is no such thing as punishment because punishment implies rules, a plan. Yet he believes he will be punished. The justice and the punishment will be severe. His suffering up to the present has not been punishment. It has not been even a fraction of what he deserves.)

 _Tell me a story._ He might not say it. He hears himself say things now, but who knows if he actually says them. Unreality has all the clarity and vividness of the real. But either way: _Tell me a story._ And as she begins to speak, haltingly at first and then with greater confidence, he sets the plate aside and lowers himself into the grass and lays his head in her lap, closes his eyes and listens to her tell him a story about two children lost in the woods, the defeat of a cruel witch, finding their way home with breadcrumbs. Listens to her tell him a story about a clever girl and a wolf, and victory snatched from the very literal jaws of defeat. Tells him a story like maybe she once told to the daughter she lost, who he tried so hard to find, who he failed.

These are stupid stories. All stories are fucking stupid. Stories in a world like this can't be anything other than stupid lies and he hates them with a coldly boiling intensity.

But she tells them and they settle over him like a blanket, and his hatred is quiet.

The circle watches. Waits. Parts to let her pass - he thinks he remembers this, though it's hazy and indistinct and it might be a dream, because Carol is floating inches above the ground, her head and hands brilliant with moonlight - and then he's alone with them, and they whisper things he can't understand.

He wraps the blanket around himself, curls on his side. Covers his ears. Sleeps.

* * *

Then he gets up and paces the circle. This is a dream, or might not be. It doesn't matter. It has never mattered. He paces the circle and one by one he touches their faces, except they have no faces, and his hands sink into cold darkness. Human-shaped voids surrounding him, but still they have eyes and still they watch him. When he withdraws his hands from them the flesh is peeling off, exposing pale bone. But he doesn't stop. One by one he touches them and little by little he's eaten away, until it's all skeleton to the wrists, picked clean and dry with months of weathering.

He steps back into the center of the circle. They raise their hands and point at him and the screams of crows fill the air. They rise and rise and then they're trees and he's in the woods, the woods he walked through for so long to get to _her,_ and bodies sway above him, hanging from the branches. Creaking and groaning, trapped death sounds. A breadcrumb trail before and behind him, burst eyeballs trailing nerves and leaking jelly, scatter of gray-pink churned brain, broken shards of bone.

Something skittering through the underbrush. Clicking of claws. Flash of blades in the moonlight, black blood. His fingers are still fleshless. Polished ivory. Beautiful. He could break them off like twigs and make gifts of them to her.

 _Here, they can't hurt you now._

But he still has his teeth.

Words, too. Awful words. That's something he can fix. He bites his tongue in half and swallows it whole, thick and slippery down his throat like the lung of a fox.

 _Come back._ The bodies. The trees. The things in the dark. The worms squirming out of the ground under his feet and the ants marching up his legs, the wriggling maggots in his skull, the buzzing flies, the screaming crows. The silence of a dead heart. _Come back to us. This is where you belong._

 _Her too._

* * *

He wakes up.

Maybe. He might. It's possible. But there's that gap in time where he's genuinely not sure, where everything feels like it could be going in either direction, and he's lost. Minutes. Hours. Was in the grass - no, in the _woods,_ beyond the walls, but now he's behind the walls again and he's in the dark and silent house, moving soundlessly through its pale corridors and over its gleaming floors, and the things in the corners are not those skinless crouching monstrosities but instead those waiting holes in the world, standing very straight and watching his passage. Judging the rightness of every step.

He ignores them as best he can.

Whispering beetles swarm over the walls. Flow in waves toward the stairs. He's expected to follow.

He does.

Sleeping, everyone. Except him, all sleeping. He's done this before - drifted through this drowsing house like a ghost himself, felt his own wakefulness in the way one can only when surrounded by sleep. Wakefulness like a dream, like dense fog even when its edges are sharply defined enough to cut him.

Sharp. To cut. Too much flesh on his hands.

He's been going about this far too slowly.

He's done it before, climbing the stairs in the dark. But when he's done it before, he hasn't been doing so with this house itself as his object. This hasn't been his intent. _Her,_ it's always been _her -_ out into the cool night, the breeze and the moonlight and the color washed out of everything, cleaned and polished and beautiful, a world of obsidian and ivory, and he moved across the grass and the pavement and the grass again and to her window and watched her, from outside and then from inside in her arms, and always it's been _her,_ his final destination.

Stumbled through those hospital doors with blood streaking his hands, stumbled through with nothing but stolen boots and stolen clothes and a scalpel and a beacon of fire in the distance to follow, fire with a voice that sang blades into his brain. All this way, and she's the end of everything.

But he's not going to her now.

At the top of the stairs he stops. Listens. Breathing. Thud of heartbeats, the pulsing of the shadows, veins snaking along the walls like vines. Standing in the ventricle of a giant heart, inhaling blood as it flows around him, hallways as arteries. This place is alive.

Him, half-life only. Looks back down the stairs; trail of glistening ink. He tracks death with him. He's a cancer in the core of this organ. He's a malignant tumor, bits of himself breaking off, metastasizing in the entire Zone, and before it burns it'll drown in its own bleeding lungs.

But her. She won't burn. Or drown.

Not like that.

He's very distracted. This won't do. Those beetles again, clicking down the hall toward the bathroom with human hands and human faces, more whispers. Stories, told by himself to himself - because doesn't he remember this too? First night. _Shower._ Didn't want to; did because Carol said. Asked. Hated her and himself and most of that was because he knew he would do it, and he did.

Turned off the light and stripped, was naked for the first time in an unutterably long time and he looked at himself and took it like a beating, and it was nearly unbearable but he bore it. Dragged himself under the spray. Rinsed away the filth - the filth people can see. There's all the rest of it, and water won't ever take care of _that._

But doesn't he remember? Walking down the silent hallway now, past the door behind which the Boy sleeps - doesn't he remember the thing he noticed that night? Not the water. Not his own strange, disgusting body. Not the moon through the cascading droplets, silver and so lovely on the back of his hand, reminding him of everything he doesn't get to be and to have.

There was something else. Before all of that, before he turned off the light. And after.

A memory riding a memory. _Her._ Something about her.

The door doesn't creak as he pushes it open and steps into a room of cool, gently echoing tile, closes it behind him, locks it. He wanted to come in here, today before when things were first beginning to be bad. Come in and fill the tub and lie down in the cold, feel himself slowing and slowing. Rest inside it. He reaches out and touches the wall, runs his fingers along the separations in the blocks of tile. His hands stopped bleeding a while ago and now they look smeared with ink - maybe the same ink he trailed up the stairs.

Looks at the pale, clean tile and thinks about pale, clean bone. Nothing left to chew on. Nothing left to rip or tear, and nothing left to hurt.

The shower curtain pulled closed. He steps away from the wall and tugs it aside and there's one of them, standing where he would have laid himself down, all blackness and invisible eyes.

Here to make sure.

Turns. Window, spill of moonlight across the floor. Toilet, basket of fake colorless flowers. Stainless steel wastebasket. Sink.

His own face.

Nothing behind him. Just him, all shadow himself, his eyes the only things shining. Because there _is_ light in them. They're not black pits that eat every photon like something endlessly ravenous. They were that night, and it made him so fucking angry, so fucking _sad,_ and Carol was there behind him getting things ready for him and he wanted to-

 _Oh._

It wasn't night when _she_ did it. Tried.

Still.

Extends a hand and glides his fingertips down the slick surface of the glass. Leaves only faint smears of grease and old blood behind. She broke the mirror. That was how she did it. She broke the mirror and she took one of the pieces and she tried. Got part of the way.

 _How did you know you didn't want to?_

He wasn't there. Knew but he didn't see. Wasn't there with her when she did it, tried, destroyed her own reflection and tried to destroy herself with its shards. Thinking: should have been in there, then, gripped her wrist and held the glass to it and made her finish the job, get it _right,_ even if she didn't want to and she struggled, stupid bitch too scared to fucking _commit_ but he'd help her. Slash those pretty veins open. She was entirely correct.

There was and is no fucking point.

She almost made it all go away. She almost made it stop. Sitting under the spray that night, he thought about that. Noticed it. Noted it. Filed it away in the ruins of his system.

Forgot until now.

If the whore didn't chicken out at the last minute, none of this ever would have happened to him. Standing here staring at the mirror and now they're all behind him, a crowd of silent shadows, looming over him and meeting his gaze and raising their arms to point at his hand where it lies flat against the glass.

All in unison: flashing grins.

 _You know._

So, then.

He jerks his hand back into a fist and slams it into the mirror and it shatters into a hundred beautiful sparkling shards, a hailstorm of diamonds into the sink already stained with his blood and transformed into pretty rubies, and the musical tinkle-chime of the breakage isn't over before he knows he has to work fast. Shard - the right side, the right shape, like a gift, and he's curling his hand around it and cutting more, cutting his palm to the bone, and the room is full of tall dark forms opening their red eyes and hissing _yes fucking finally you get it you stupid little shit yessssssss_

Voices?

Put them away.

There's still so little flesh on his arms. His veins are blue rivers beneath his skin and so close to the surface. Easy. Bent over the sink, long straight deep lengthwise cut, and it doesn't hurt - or maybe it does, but his ridiculous tolerance for pain interprets it as a sliver of nothing, and he watches as the blood surges hard and sudden and flows over the rest of the glass, turns every reflection to red.

 _Yes._

Already dizzy. The world is warm and receding very rapidly. He did what he needed to do. The thing is behind him now, shouldering his older demons out of the way, snarling with fury, because _it_ didn't do everything it needed to do, _wanted_ to do, shrieking in his ear with its bared razor teeth _you didn't let me have her, you didn't fucking let me have her, how fucking DARE YOU_ and he's smiling as he manages the second cut and slides to his knees with a sigh.

Pounding at the door and maybe his name. But it's muffled. It doesn't matter. He heard enough in the way of details and imagined the rest: her standing there in the bright bathroom, bright girl, holding her wrist and crying _I'm sorry_ but he's not fucking sorry. He's not sorry at all. He's laughing at the thing raging behind him, slumping until his forehead is on the tile, arms limp against the floor and his blood pumping free and pooling to join the lake of moonlight as he summons the last of his strength and makes the final smooth cut across his throat and lets the glass fall from his numb fingers, because _I win._

 _I win, you sick fuck. I win._

 _I'm better._

* * *

He jerks his hand back.

No fist. No breaking. Alone in the room, narrowing his eyes at himself. Mouthing words at what he can't see. Or at what he can. Not sure whose words they are. Not sure whose tongue. Whose teeth.

 _Nice try, asshole._

Not like this.

But he knows. He gets it. He remembers.

* * *

Back downstairs. Back to his room. He was wrong, stupid; it's better this way, much better than outside. Quiet and very dark, and his soft familiar nest is open for him. He lowers himself into it, curls up nose-to-tail, closes his eyes and listens to the shifting walls. The whispers behind them and the beating of a monstrous heart. He's inside it. Latent. Still small, but here, incubating. Waiting for his feverish moment. Waiting for it all to burn.

Not her, though. Her in the midst of the flame, and if she does burn it'll be with her own fire. The other flames will spare her for him. Keep her safe. Keep her until he can go to her.

Take her.

Take her where they both belong.

* * *

 **Note:** Yes, this was extraordinarily manipulative.

I kind of want to acknowledge that, and kind of semi-apologize, as well as confess that I'm not at all done being this level of manipulative. Some of that is because this is at heart a horror story, and I believe that good horror should ideally be stressful. And part of that is making it clear that something horrible could come out of nowhere at any time. In a sense I want you guys to feel like you're actually _in_ Daryl's head, at least as close as I can get to that.

Some of it is just that I'm a Gimple-esque asshole. Which you should already know.

So yeah. Sorry/not sorry. ❤️


	32. to wither in denial

**Note:** Not much to say here, except that I'm very appreciative of anyone and everyone who's still with me after the jerk-ass shit I pulled in the last chapter (which I maintain was necessary but it was still some pretty jerk-ass shit). Also, how are there now 150k+ words of this? I honestly thought this would probably be the length of Safe Up Here With You. Again, I really should give up trying to estimate the length of my own stuff. But it turns out the pacing in this is just totally different, and really has to be. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 32: to wither in denial**

 _We've read the back of the book, we know what's going to happen. The fields burned, the land destroyed, the lovers left broken in the brown dirt. And then it's gone._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He can be all right.

So he wakes up and he is.

Comes out of his room like a normal person. Dressed like a normal person, although fuck shoes still, because why the fuck is why. Eats like a normal person when Rick puts food in front of him, even if he can't taste it and isn't even sure what it is. Doesn't notice because it doesn't matter, and this isn't normal, at least he's pretty sure it's not, but he's not actually normal at all anyway. He's _fucked up._ Extraordinarily much. It's a formal diagnosis now.

He's just pretending.

Thinking about it like camouflage today. Like hiding in the shadows, in the trees. Among walkers. In plain sight. _They_ know he's fucked up, but he can try what he's tried before and seem like he's not dangerous. Maybe make them almost believe he isn't.

Yesterday he apparently _took a big step._ He knows this because he's told. Rick tells him. Carol reinforces it, but there's something about her eyes when she says it, and he doesn't look at her for too long because he's sure she'll see what he's doing. The pretending.

Sure she already does.

Yes, it was a big step. He supposes for someone else it might be a step forward. But he took that step and then he slaughtered himself inside his head, and it feels like perhaps it meant something beyond the vivid consideration of a possible option.

Like another big step might be progress beyond _I want to be dead all the time_ to the point where desire translates into action.

Maybe not. Who the fuck knows. At any rate he nods and doesn't argue with them. There's no point. Not certain what the substance of his argument would even be. On paper nothing much has changed. Off paper nothing much has changed. On anything nothing much has changed. What matters right now is that he's not a roiling inferno of despairing, hateful rage, and he's not in so much pain that he can barely move. He's not in pain really at all, relative to how it's been. Gentle throbbing when he looks too directly into the light. His fingers hurt, even if so far today he hasn't tried to make a snack of them. Otherwise it's all right.

He can be all right.

Denise is going to come by today. Another nod. Staring down at the top of the kitchen island, trailing his battered fingertips along subtle little patterns in the polished granite. Cool. Soothing. Denise, yes. He can handle that. Provided she's moderate with her stupid fucking questions and doesn't drag him too hard in any particular direction, he can hold his shit together. Or he can fake it well enough. He can pretend.

Probably not well enough to fool her, perceptive bitch so fucking _infuriating,_ but it's remotely possible that she won't call him on it.

Stares down at the granite and imagines his blood pooling there. Knife block within reach if he leans. Wouldn't need a big one. Just sharp.

Whispers from the gaping holes in the pulsing, breathing walls that he's only delaying the inevitable.

Thing is. Well. Watching morning kitchen traffic move by, Michonne on her way out to talk to Deanna about something, Carol doing something with inventory later, and the Boy and the Baby passing on through as rapidly as possible. Watching them all and feeling like he's a hundred yards removed from all of them, like either they're not quite real or he's not quite real or both, because _real_ doesn't mean anything anymore anyway. Like if he did slash his veins open it might take them a while to notice. Kind of curious about that though he doesn't presently intend to find out.

What was he saying? Oh. Oh, right.

Thing is, there's more than one direction that knife could go in.

* * *

"Beth, I'm serious. We don't have to go."

Maggie folds her arms and leans against the wall in the front hallway, her mouth a thin line. Maggie is not comfortable with this. That makes two of them. Approximately ninety seconds ago Beth had her hand on the doorknob. Now she's standing with her hand by her side, her rifle over her shoulder, due on the wall in five minutes and while punctuality isn't really a thing, right now she feels like making it one.

She didn't sleep well. Not that she is these days even without him here, not that she has in a long goddamn time, but she lay awake in the dark and considered the possibility of getting up and going across the street, going around back, lying down in the grass beside him and pulling him against her again and holding him as tight as she can, because he doesn't belong anywhere, but to her it feels like that's just about the closest he gets anymore.

He might feel the same.

She didn't go to him. She stayed where she was and she stared at the ceiling until the shadows seethed like stormclouds, and she wondered if she'll ever again know if she's doing the right thing.

Now she sighs and briefly squeezes her eyes closed and prays to a god she no longer truly believes in for patience. "Maggie, swear, I'll be fine."

"Both of us don't have to go," Maggie persists. It's just because she cares. Beth tells herself that over and over. It's just because she cares so much. "I can stay here. Glenn can stay here."

"And whoever stays is gonna be freakin' out the whole time and drivin' me nuts." Which isn't entirely fair. It wouldn't be that bad. But it wouldn't be good, and if she's irritated by what she feels like is a need to provide her with a _babysitter,_ a deeper part of her doesn't want to watch them go through that, because it'll hurt to see. They've been apart enough, Maggie and Glenn have. More than enough.

When people have each other, that should be protected. Whether or not it means anything in the end. Whether or not there's any point.

"So like I said, we can find someone else to take the slots on the run. Rosita and Abraham would probably-"

 _Oh for fuck's sake._ "They just got back a week ago. Be a dick move askin' 'em to go out again now." And there's one very specific thing that this is really about, and Maggie won't _say_ it, and Beth gets it, she doesn't even genuinely blame her for it because even thinking it is absolutely horrible, but it's still there, and she's so damn _sick_ of dancing around this bullshit.

She fixes Maggie with a gaze full of all the hard weariness she feels. "He's not gonna fuckin' murder me if you leave me alone for a couple days."

Maggie blinks at her, throat working. For an awful moment, Beth is almost certain she's going to cry. And if Maggie starts, she's not sure that she can keep herself from doing it too.

 _And do you actually believe that? Do you?_

"Beth-"

She shakes her head, bites at her lip. "Maggie… Can you not? I know, can you just not?"

What this is. What's happened. What's going on. That she's in love with a man who's utterly insane, and who - yes - is a killer. And not in the way the rest of them are.

Good that Glenn's not here. He would hate this, if anything more than Maggie does. It's possible, Beth supposes, that he arranged it so that he wouldn't be.

"You're talkin' about people worryin'," Maggie says softly. "It's not even just that, Beth. It's not."

"You want me to tell you everythin's alright?" She lifts a shoulder, and the gesture feels like it looks as helpless as she is. At least when it comes to this. "It's not. Nothin' is _all right._ It's not like that's new. Sooner or later, though…" She glances at the door, by extension at the street beyond and the house across it and that house's occupants. "Sooner or later we go on livin'. I can't live like I'm terrified of him. And you can't live like I'm a kid."

Maggie's smile is pained to the bone. To the marrow. "You ain't been a kid in a long time."

"No." She tries to return the smile. Isn't positive she succeeds. Isn't positive that's a bad thing. "We don't get to be kids anymore."

Maggie crosses her arms more tightly, hugs herself, looks down at the floor for a long time. Beth lets the silence be. She could walk out of here right now, through that door and down the street, and she doesn't think Maggie would make even a token effort to stop her. But that would feel bad. Worse than staying and waiting for whatever's at the end of the silence itself.

"You had to go and love him like you do," Maggie breathes finally, and there isn't one iota of blame in her voice.

Beth nods. "Yeah. I did." She pauses, fingering the frayed leather of the strap over her shoulder. "Someone has to."

Maggie is quiet again. Her face is flat but behind her features and beneath the surface, a hundred different emotions are fighting for supremacy. Fighting for the right to rule her. Again, Beth lets it play out.

She has no control over any of this.

"Alright. We'll go. We'll head out tomorrow morning like we planned." Maggie releases a long breath, uncrosses her arms and allows her hands to fall to her sides as if she has no idea what else to do with them. But when her gaze meets and holds Beth's, it's sharp. Hard. She has her own edges, and with Beth they might not show so much, but it's not because she thinks Beth needs any special softness.

It's that they all do. And none of them get to have that anymore, either. Not in the end.

"We'll go," she repeats. "But you keep your gun close. Your knife. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Promise me."

"I promise," she says immediately. No hesitation. No wavering. Total acceptance of what this means.

And even after she's through the door and heading down the steps and toward the street, she has no idea whether or not she was lying.

* * *

Of course Denise wants to talk about yesterday.

Living room again. At some point he'll remember that he increasingly hates this room, demand that they do this somewhere else if they're going to do it at all. Staring around at all of it as she starts to speak, only half-listening, her voice descending into a dull drone - looking at the tasteful curtains and upholstery and accent pieces and rug and molding, and it was a nasty little throwaway line when he hissed at Rick about repainting the walls with his own shit, but suddenly he's actually imagining it, _doing it,_ and it's almost _funny,_ it's disgusting and horrible and utterly hilarious because of what a wondrous new low it would be, and he focuses on Denise so hard and so sudden he'd swear he hears an audible snap, and whatever she sees on his face shuts her the fuck up.

 _Hey._ He doesn't want to be here. This place fucking sucks.

She blinks at him. Nonplussed, but not upset. He's glad about that. Doesn't want to be glad, instinctively resents it, but he is.

Okay. Does he want to go somewhere else?

Nod. He doesn't have to think about it, in the end. Yeah. Yeah, he really does.

* * *

So they get there and he realizes to his utter horror that he gives a shit about what she thinks of it.

Stands there with his hands twitching, picking at each other and twisting loose chewed cuticle and trying not to and failing miserably, he shouldn't give a shit so _why the fuck does he give a shit,_ and watches her look around the garage, her eyes behind those glasses moving across the shelves and the workbench and the tools and the bike under the tarp and the whole thing, whole deal, crawling over it all like hungry beetles crawling under his skin.

She'll tell him it's a bad idea. It's pointless. It's bullshit. It's stupid. He's stupid for thinking there's anything to it, any reason why he should sink any of his time and highly limited energy into it at all. He's stupid anyway but this makes it worse, because what the fuck is he going to do with a fucking _bike?_ Ride it out of here? Right, sure, with vicious thunderstorms raging inside his skull and a total inability to differentiate between what's real and what's not and a significant amount of doubt regarding whether the difference is even meaningful. He'll ride it out of here and crash it less than a mile down the road, slam into a fucking tree trunk or the side of a damn building, shatter every bone in his worthless body, splatter the decaying remains of his brain all over the pavement.

So maybe it's a good idea, actually. Maybe he should.

He's stupid and this is pointless bullshit and he knows all that, but Christ, he doesn't want her to tell him so.

His thumb is bleeding and he curls it into his fist. Hides it. His sweat makes it sting and at least it's something to pin his attention on.

She's turning back to him and he's already cringing, hating himself for it, hating her, hating everything, gaze skittering to a socket wrench on the worktable and thinking sickeningly about what he might be able to do with it if he can get to it before she can try to stop him-

But she's smiling.

Yeah, this is a good idea. This is good for him.

He gapes at her. Wonders how obvious his shock is.

If she notices, she doesn't let on. And she's not lying. She's not fucking with him. He's almost sure. So far she hasn't fucked with him anyway. It's not her MO. Seems like she says pretty much what she means, and she's saying it's a good thing.

He swallows. Looks away.

 _You're in that house all day, pretty much every day. Rick and Carol and Michonne say a lot of the time you're in your room. That means you're living in your head, and your head… No one should have to live in there the whole time._

Grits his teeth. But she's not sugar-coating shit. She's letting it stink, because it does. His head is a ghastly place to live in. His head is Hell. Fire and brimstone and cackling demons. In his more lucid moments he's piercingly, externally aware of that and all at once he's also piercingly, externally aware that he's currently in the midst of one of his more lucid moments.

 _You get out of the house, you get in here, work on something outside yourself, and you're getting something at the end of it. Something real. You can look at it and see what you did._

The fuck is she talking about?

Well, can he get it running?

Shrug. Maybe. He doesn't know. Beth says he can.

Does he trust Beth?

He's about to shake his head, and then he doesn't. Because he _does._ He doesn't, because she's a cruel, lying cunt, but he does, because she loves him, she loved him when no one else did, when he had nothing, and she might be all he has now.

Okay, how about this? She nods at the hulk of the tarp. Does he _want_ to get it running?

No answer. He spends a few confusing, painful moments looking for one. Comes up empty. Sitting on the floor of his mind with his knees drawn up against his chest and looking despairingly around at the wreckage of himself. What he _wants_. Simple fucking questions and he can't answer them. Should, even as stupid as he is now, and he can't.

Shrug. Head down. _I'unno_.

Beth's arms, held so tight. Face pressed into the warm, soft shelter of her throat. Simple then, and he said it. Things he didn't want. Things he did.

 _I want it to stop. I don't want to be like this anymore._

 _I want to get better._

He lifts his eyes and she's looking at him, and he knows he said it aloud, at least the last part, and he wants to kill her with his bare hands and he wants to turn and plunge into the sunlight and let it explode his brain through his eye sockets. Let it burn him to ash.

He wants to fucking cry.

 _If you want to get better, you will._

He shakes his head. The movement is furious and it swirls the blood inside him like cheap wine against the sides of a glass, makes him dizzy. Pulses light and pain at the edges of his vision, walls briefly melting into wet veined barriers of flesh. _Don't you fucking lie to me, you bitch. Don't you dare._

She's not. He will. Might take a long time, might hurt a hell of a lot, and he'll never be who he was. He's been dealt the kind of damage you don't ever completely heal from. But if he wants to get _better,_ that's something he can do.

Gazes at her through a thin, colorless haze of nauseated misery as glistening things with too many legs swarm around her. This was a trap, coming here. He trapped his own fucking self. Winched the teeth of a bear trap open and strolled right into it. He was an expert at that before; didn't need a bullet to the head to cultivate that particular skill.

(From his earliest days, when it came to certain things he was cursed with an unusual amount of self-awareness. His observational learning skills were considerable; they had to be. It was about survival at the most basic level. Patterns, details, reading emotional landscapes. Reading landscapes of every kind. He understands even now that when it comes to his perception of himself, he possesses a sizable blind spot, but as soon as he was able, he was analyzing the infernal logic of his own abuse. He knew what it was. He knew what was happening to him. He knew it was ruining him inside, knew it well enough to construct what internal defenses he could, boarding up windows against the endless, eyeless hurricane. So it didn't take a huge mental leap to pick up the book in the shelter. He saw the title and immediately recognized himself. _Interrupted life._ Yes. That resonated, chimed inside him. That made a horrific amount of sense. And he never got a real look at what was in that book, but he would never have needed it to explain to him that he has maintained what his father started and his brother - in some small and terrible measure - continued. He doesn't know what it is to live without someone hurting him, so whenever the people who hurt him stopped, he took up the slack. Filled in for them. Hurt himself more effectively and more deeply than they ever would have been capable of.)

(He hurts himself now like he's on a mission, because in essence he is.)

He glances down at his hand. Blood from his torn thumb is smeared between his fingers. He can't even make it a couple fucking hours without doing it.

Looks back up at her. He can get better. What the fuck. Not just pretend but _get better._

 _How?_

He can keep talking to her. If he doesn't want to think of it as _therapy,_ that's fine. It doesn't have to be that. It's just talking.

That's fucking ridiculous. He barks a laugh. Like _talking_ is going to make this any fucking better at all, like verbal exchanges are going to arrest or repair any of his ongoing destruction. Okay. Sure. Great. That's a good one, does she have any more like that?

Quiet a moment. And he realizes that she actually doesn't want to say whatever she's going to say. Or she's reluctant. Uncertain.

It's been a while since she was uncertain with him. He wants to grab her by the shoulders, shake her. _Spit it out. Fucking say it, say it or I'll rip it out of you. I'll rip out your fucking tongue._

 _You have to be sure. You have to be sure because I can't be sure about anything and one of us has to be, please, please be sure._

He's gnawing at his bleeding thumb. She's watching him do it, and all at once with a surge of frustrated anger he can't understand why she doesn't try to make him _stop_.

The other thing they can try, along with the talking, is medication.

This shouldn't be so difficult to comprehend. Yet he can't comprehend it. _Medication_. He has some vague idea of what that would consist of. The pills for his head, the antibiotics, whatever merciful liquid sleep was in that needle. All the shit they pumped him full of at the hospital - fuck, there were so many different things. His favorite was the morphine, but even the morphine didn't do much a lot of the time. He's witnessed the rampant use of heroin, crack, OxyContin, crystal meth.

So… So what, then? What kind of _medication?_

Stuff for his hands, for one thing. Probably can't make that go away completely, but they might be able to get it under control. His anger. His depression. His mood swings. His hallucinations. Mood stabilizers, anticonvulsants, antidepressants, antipsychotics. Those _words,_ simple fucking words for the relentless torment he's living in, words like slaps to the face because they're _easy,_ offensively so. Biting down harder on his thumb, ripping at the patch of loose skin. There's a lot wrong with his brain, and drugs can't even _begin_ to fix all of it, but they can help. They might.

If he wants to get better. If he's willing to try.

He looks at her, blood flowing warm and sweet into his mouth, and maybe he's stupid, maybe he's a drooling moron now, but it takes him approximately five seconds to see the problem.

Yeah, well. That sounds fantastic.

So what happens when they run out?

Apparently she has nothing to say to that.

Except suddenly her eyes are so _sad,_ so fucking _sad_ behind those damn glasses, and everything in him wrenches in on itself. Finally it's happened. She's fucking with him. She's suggesting something like this, like it'll _work,_ like it's anything but a _lie,_ and again he's eyeing that socket wrench and thinking about caving her face in with it. Breaking those glasses into her eyeballs.

She's _fucking_ with him, because she can buy him what, a few weeks of relative sanity, maybe a few months at the very possible best, and then it all goes back to hell. Literally, he gets sucked back into _Hell,_ and before that he'll be lucid enough to know it's coming and know there's nothing he can to do stop it, counting down the days until it happens all over again, until he loses himself, until the grinning creatures lurking in the shadows come to drag him down, she's suggesting this like it's not just another especially elaborate form of torture, and he's lunging toward the bike and gripping it through the tarp and _hurling_ it over onto its side.

He's still very thin. But he's very strong. If anything he's stronger than he ever was before, and gravity is his ally in this task. The bike hits the concrete and he hears something break.

Maybe more than one thing.

Staring blankly down at it, and up at her, and there are tears in her eyes.

She just wants to help him.

No. Fuck that. _Fuck you._ If this is how he's going to be in the end, he's going to fucking stay that way. No false steps up just so he can fall back down. Baring his teeth, snarling at her. She can give him the shit for the storms in his head. If she wants to stick him with any more needles and bless him with dreamless sleep, she's more than welcome to do that. Klonopin, Xanax, those are fine too even if they don't seem to do a whole lot for him. Otherwise, keep her _medication_ the fuck away from him. Take her _medication_ and shove it up her cunt.

So no. He doesn't want to _get better._

When he turns and stalks into the sunlight, it doesn't even have the decency to burn him to death.

* * *

Beth comes to him in the early evening, and he's not crippled with pain or lost in a whirlwind of rage, but _something_ has obviously happened. Carol says it was something to do with Denise, but it's not clear - Denise hasn't relayed what went down and Daryl sure as hell isn't providing any details. He came back from wherever he and she went together, and he came back alone. Said nothing. Went to his room and didn't come out. Still hasn't come out. No one has tried to make him, because everyone knows better than that by now. Rick went in to check on him about an hour ago and that didn't end horribly, but he wouldn't talk.

He's just sitting there and staring at nothing.

At least he's not _doing anything_ to himself, as far as they can tell.

So okay. She sighs. Goes into the downstairs bathroom and rinses her face in cold water and looks at herself in the mirror for a moment or two. The face of a girl who doesn't know when to give up.

Worst kind of funny that this is an improvement. Or it might be.

When to give up is _never._ Fucking never.

So she goes in.

Like Rick said, he's just sitting there. Sitting there facing the door with his back against the wall beneath the window, knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them, light falling all around him through the curtains and throwing his face into even deeper shadow. She can't make out his features at all.

Except slowly her vision adjusts to the dimness and slowly she can, and for a few seconds that yank her heart up through her throat she sees that his eyes are _enormous_ , far bigger than anyone's eyes should be, gaping black voids in his head from which no light escapes. And they're growing. Expanding, eating his face with dark.

And he's _looking at her._

Then she blinks, or he does, and they're just his eyes. Faint glitter. Yes, he's looking at her, but it's not awful.

He just looks tired.

She steps forward. "Daryl?"

Nothing. Except the smallest inclination of his head, possibly her imagination, and she doesn't know if it means anything at all but she takes it as an invitation, crosses the room to him and sinks into a crouch in front of him.

Okay. Okay, maybe nothing about him is _normal,_ but his eyes are indeed the size they should be. Since he came back they've looked bigger and deeper in the gauntness of his face, but other than that.

And he's there. It's him. Not a thing wearing his face like a mask, but _him_.

"You alright?"

By now it's such a self-evidently idiotic question that it feels like a joke, like something shared between them. Kind of nice, in a twisted way.

Anyway, he doesn't answer. He merely looks at her.

"Something happen with Denise?" She lifts a hand and strokes it over his hair, combs her fingers through the usual tangles, brushes them back from his brow. He doesn't lean into her touch, but he also doesn't try to move away, and that's encouraging. Or she's more than willing to take it on that basis. "Somethin' go wrong? Can you tell me-"

He stops her. Sudden but very soft, hand on her wrist - not trying to yank her away, not gripping. Just holding onto her, thumb against the outer curve of bone. Closing his eyes and releasing a soft breath.

Not a thing wearing his face, no. Except it's there too, just like the rest of him. Or what remains of him. Very far beneath, but it's there, deep shadows moving beneath the surface of dark water.

It's always there now.

 _Who's_ really _wearing the mask, then? Who's_ really _hiding?_

"Can we not talk?" Whisper. But not a weak one. His breath warm on the inside of her wrist. "Can we just… Can you just be here?"

He came to her, that night what feels like months ago, and all at once everything fell away, or the ghost of him came rushing in to claim his body, and he asked her if she was all right. Because he saw her having a nightmare. Asked her if she was all right, told her he wasn't mad that she lied to him. Was calm. For a few moments, sane. Sweet, without the sadness, if a little hesitant. A little nervous. His face, his eyes in the candlelight, licking grape jelly off his lips and unable to fully meet her gaze. _There with her._

Like that now. So tired, but like that.

"Alright," she whispers, pauses, then turns and lowers herself down to sit beside him, her upper arm against his. And after another moment his hand slips between them and finds hers, threads their fingers. The roughness of his torn, broken skin, jagged edges of his nails, but she holds on. Squeezes, careful.

And he tips his head loosely against her shoulder, and he rests there.

And maybe something happened. But it's almost all right. He's with her now, and he's _him_ and whatever is swimming down there in the shadows is confined to the shadows, and it's so close to all right. She turns her head and grazes her lips against his brow.

 _Keep your gun close. Promise me._ Everything that meant. What she was promising to do.

She was lying.


	33. I send this smile over to you

**Chapter 33: I send this smile over to you**

 _You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She goes to the gates to watch them leave.

She doesn't do this normally. Not that Maggie and Glenn have gone out on a whole lot of runs, at least not together - however determined they were to do so this time - but anytime any of them leaves. Abraham and Rosita, Tara and Heath, Michonne and Rick, or Rick and Aaron the very few times Rick took that place and that particular job - not one he's especially well-suited to and he's never pretended otherwise, but Aaron needed a wingman those times, and Rick volunteered.

And one of those times, he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Or all wrong. Depending.

Not wrong. She leans back against the wall and crosses her arms, ducks her head briefly and closes her eyes. Not wrong, because it's entirely plausible that Daryl would have summarily killed Aaron if Rick hadn't been there to get his attention. Just to be safe. Killed him or left him for the walkers.

Daryl doesn't save people anymore.

And why should he? Who ever saved him, at least in this new incarnation of himself? She's not prepared to count Edwards, mostly because she doubts very much that Daryl would do so. She's certain by now that he does not in any way regard what happened to him as being _saved._

Well, whatever. It all happened the way it did, no way to change any of it, and now she's watching them load up the last of the car - this time with Heath and Spencer - and pull up to the gates and say their final goodbyes.

She steps forward when Maggie turns to her, and ignores what she sees in her sister's eyes. Because she can't change that either. Maggie acquiesced to going but Maggie will worry, and there's nothing to be done about that as well.

Into the circle of Maggie's arms and they close around her, strong, stabilizing, and for a few wonderful, terrible seconds she feels almost sixteen again, the world ending around her but her big sister there with her, alive and so calm, so capable, so for a while at least everything was all right. And after. It wasn't all that long after the farm when she stopped depending on Maggie for her own emotional solidity, but it wasn't like it stopped mattering.

Isn't like it doesn't matter now.

She remembers the night after they ran from Atlanta. Not very clearly, but she does. Exhausted from crying, and the rest of them were exhausted in every other respect, in shock, numb, mostly silent, staring into a dying campfire with the van at their backs and no one eating because that night there was nothing to eat.

Not a problem. She's guessing she wasn't the only one who wouldn't have been able to keep anything down.

His blood was still all over her.

She was curled in on herself, shivering, and Maggie pulled her close, wrapped everything around her, held her until she stopped. Held her until she fell into a thin, fitful sleep and kept holding her when she woke up screaming and clawing at her own face, clamped a hand over her mouth to muffle the screams.

Maggie was there. Through everything, she was there. Never asked for anything. Never demanded anything. Was just _there._ Now she's saying goodbye. And it shouldn't be a big deal, but for the last second of those terrible and wonderful few, she very nearly asks Maggie not to go.

Not even sure why. It's not that she's scared.

Even if she should be, she's not scared.

Maggie steps back without a word, and then it's Glenn pulling her into his arms, quick but firm - quick because he rightly senses that she doesn't want anything lingering. And he wasn't there the way Maggie was, not the same because he couldn't have been, but he was there in his own way, and she noticed. Even through days of states that approached catatonia, she noticed.

Couldn't not.

If they're leaving now, she was right. Life is going on. Somehow, according to a logic she can't begin to understand and won't try, it's going on.

Getting in the car now, Maggie sliding in behind the wheel, the doors closing, the gate grinding and creaking as it slides open. It's a cloudy morning and getting cloudier every inch the sun rises behind that low gray curtain, but what sun makes it through hits with a hard glare and the car shines dully. Everything seems to shine dully, simultaneously too much light and not enough, and she blinks and puts up a hand as she watches them drive through and out onto the road. Into the Outside.

He doesn't belong in here. But he doesn't belong out there, either. He doesn't belong anywhere.

 _He'll die out there._

 _He could die in here just as easy._

She turns away, glances up when a flash catches her eye. Sasha on the wall, holding her gun. Watching her, face thrown into shadow. After a moment, she raises a hand to Beth, singular and stationary.

Beth raises her own.

They never spoke about it, but for a while they had something in common. Only other person she really felt that way with aside from Rick - and that quarter had plenty of its own problems. The ground between her and Rick was cracked and shifting and too hot to walk on comfortably, boiling with concealed magma. They kept a distance because it was too much not to do so. Sasha was approachable, even if there wasn't much approaching, and that was good. Simply the knowledge that she could cross that ground if she wanted to was something vaguely like a comfort.

That's over now. A lot of things are over.

A lot of things should be.

She puts her head down and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans, hunches her shoulders, walks away.

* * *

In the end the clouds might be why.

Standing in his room, curtain tugged aside, gazing out at the street and the weird shifting light and thinking it might not destroy him if he stepped into it. Might not sear his skin blistered and blackened and cracked, melt him down like wax, burn him to cinders, head a wick of ash. Might not even hurt very much. His fingers are still shaking, whipped by the final winds of the latest departing storm, but it wasn't such a bad one, not this morning, and he feels better.

Relatively. Everything now is relative.

He doesn't actually want to take a baseball bat to his own head. So that's _better._

Turns away, glances around; the room no longer frightens him, not the way it did the day before yesterday. It's not a friendly space. Nothing in it wishes him well. The shadows seethe like black smoke, snake dark tendrils out along the walls like the pathways of infected veins, and from everywhere there are whispers, harsh grating laughter, but more than anything else now he's just tired of it. He can bear it. It's not as if this was ever a friendly place to begin with. It's not as if he's been in a friendly place ever in his fucking life.

(He does not count the prison. He now regards his time at the prison as a tremendously lengthy lie, a long con on the part of the universe. Whatever safety he felt there was an illusion and he was unbelievably stupid to fall for it. It was never safe. It was never friendly. There's nothing less friendly than something that soothes down your defenses and then rips your guts out in a single vicious twist. What he will say for it now is that it was instructive. Like any mistake he'll draw what lessons he can from it. Never rest. Never trust. It won't save him pain and there's no redemption to be had for it or for him but he'll do it all the same.)

He can bear this place, this room and the madness it contains. There are times when he believes he almost belongs, in the depths of his agonized _un_ belonging. Nevertheless he doesn't want to stay here. Not right now. Looking out at that cool grayness, something in him is reaching for it.

Not the bike. Something else.

He's touched by a species of dull interest. He'll go see what it is.

He dresses. For once he finds boots and tugs them on, sits on the stripped bed and stares down at them. They're not the ones he was wearing when he walked through the gates. Like the rest of the clothes he has now, they were given to him after his filthy rags were taken away. They aren't his, but it's not as if that matters either. Nothing he had before was _his._

Something unseen but very dense and very heavy slams into his sternum and he exhales sharply, closes his eyes, feels the perfectly balanced weight of the crossbow in his hands.

He'll never see it again. Even if he had it, he doubts he could use it effectively. Doubts he could focus enough to aim. Not the way he did. It's not like he's gone blind since the bullet took so many other things away from him, but on a fundamental level he's _unsteady_ and he knows it. Felt it in the way he killed the first time he did - no finesse, no care or restraint, far more savagery than skill. He saw a body and he wanted to destroy it and he did, and the _how_ of it didn't particularly matter at the time. He was unfocused, yes. He didn't need focus for what he was doing.

He had the scalpel then. There was blood spattered all over the walls. The floor. Himself.

He clenches his hands until the fresh scabs crack, until his nails cut into his palms. He doesn't _want_ to think about this. From his boots to his bow to _this,_ and goddamn right he's not focused enough for that. For the keen point of it, the precision it requires. He is not precise. He wanders, meanders like a drunken river, and when he fights and kills he's a brutal whirlwind. Utterly uncontrolled. He's a storm.

Waiting in his head, erupting outward. The only questions are who gets hurt in the end and how badly.

The hissing dark is creeping in at the edges. Staying in here isn't going to do him any favors. He lurches to his feet, manages to find enough steadiness to make it to the door, and by the time he puts his hand on the cool of the knob he's arrived at what passes for equilibrium these days.

He opens the door and steps out into the hall, blinking in the light. Listening to the house, for signs of presence, occupation, life. Behind him in the shadows, something chortles. It's an ugly sound and as such it fits his aesthetic to a tee.

He's not all right. He's not getting better.

But he thinks he's getting better at pretending.

He doesn't make plans anymore, but like an animal he falls into habits and patterns of behavior, and one of the first things he does when he emerges into the light for anything other than to take a piss is head for the kitchen. It's not just food, though it is that; it's one of the few places in the house where he doesn't feel massively skin-clawingly uncomfortable, and usually someone is there. Usually that someone is someone he can handle. The Boy has proven adept at finding ways to avoid him just as he's been finding ways to avoid the Boy, and he's glad of that. Carol remains the easiest. Rick is reliably horrible but it's a kind of horrible that he's learned to manage. The Baby is something else he usually does his best to avoid, especially after what happened. Even if Rick is enough of an idiot to - apparently - still trust him.

But then there's Michonne. And Michonne is a whole different brand of bearable.

Michonne is colder, calmer ground. When he steps onto her, she doesn't quake under his feet. He doesn't sense thick veins of magma eager to break through to the surface and shower him and everything else with liquid fire. Of the people who have expectations of him, she appears to have fewer, though she's as unhappy as any of them about this and she's not making any special effort to hide it. He would expect nothing less. It's not in itself an issue. It's not _easy_ being around her but he can do it and most of the time his brain doesn't spin lavishly vivid homicidal scenarios.

Homicidal scenarios, sure. But for the most part not especially lavish or vivid.

A lot of it is that she doesn't appear to be into making too many attempts to talk to him. He's forgotten a lot, of course, but he thinks this was true before and he suspects he appreciated it. Strong and quiet and keenly watchful. Ruthlessly practical. Took no bullshit. All things he was inclined to appreciate.

Fragments of him still operate according to the logic of his deceased self.

Michonne is in the kitchen. Clearly getting ready to head out somewhere. Already moving toward the door with brisk strides, faltering and slowing and looking at him, and he picks at his fingers with his thumbs until the pain is something he can lean on.

Gray light, so many surfaces shining. There's no fire and no bleeding holes in the walls, only clean monochrome, and she resembles a shadow herself. He looks at her and away and at her again, knowing he's coming off as furtive and unable to stop it and hating it with a violent surge that dies away just as quickly, and in another surge the memory comes to him.

Surrounded by them. The shadows. His raw fingertips on the mirror. They pointed at him and at it and he knew what he had to do.

Idly, he considers what she would say if he told her about it. That he came within a single blow of slitting his own wrists and throat with a shard of glass, and it seemed like a very neat solution to a tremendous number of problems. He would have turned, dying like that, but he's pretty sure they would have gotten to him before it happened.

Also he kind of doesn't give a fuck. It even seems appropriate. It would merely be formalizing the unofficial.

Anyway. Anyway he's wandered again and back in the _here and now_ she's meeting his gaze, and she might not have all that many expectations of him but now her expression _is_ expectant. She's waiting for him to say something. Or waiting to see if he does at all.

Well.

(He is aware that one of his principal weaknesses was and is his penchant for overthinking. That there isn't any particular orderliness to this thought; it isn't rational or reasonable or even slightly useful. He stands faced with something difficult, something that grips his emotions at both ends and wrings them like a wet towel, and his thoughts whirl in violent circles and spin like a tire up to the axles in mud. They double back on themselves, endlessly recursive, arriving at no endpoint or conclusion. His cognition is a Möbius strip of fear and self-loathing, and it was bad before and is unfathomably worse now, and he doesn't know how to make it stop.)

(Except he does. He knows how to make it stop in the most decisive way imaginable.)

(That is a possibility for another place and another time.)

Staring out the window before, he was reaching for something. Now he drags himself screaming out of his own way and stumbles forward.

Where's Beth right now?

Michonne blinks. Again to the matter of expectations: perhaps she didn't have many, at least not any specific ones, but this is obviously unexpected. And then her eyes narrow - nearly imperceptible but perceptible all the same - and he knows why. Everyone knows. Everyone knows about the two of them by now. What other things they might think they _know_ are mysterious to him, and he doesn't even slightly give a fuck about what they _suspect,_ but that much is true. Has to be.

Him and _her_ and the rising lava dome on which they stand. The swinging rope bridge and the fiery chasm yawning below.

Why does he want to know?

This is not spite on Michonne's part. He doesn't blame her for her unease. He would be uneasy about himself too. He _is_ uneasy about himself, profoundly. He is not trustworthy.

But he supposes he could consider this _trying,_ even of a very pathetic sort _._ Possibly she'll see it that way.

Because he wants to see her.

Aha, so this is why. He figured, dimly, but now he knows what he was reaching for, what he _wants._ Wants something besides food and rest and no pain - oh, that last one is so fucking hopeless, it's utter hilarity - and torrential violence, and to ruin himself. Wants something besides waiting for her arrival and fumbling stupidly between despairing hatred and equally despairing love and something else. Something with _teeth._ This is assertive. Active. And it's about far more than making the still-alarming and still-difficult journey across the street to her house.

He wants to go to her and see her, and see what else he sees.

She pulls guard duty on the wall. That's a thing he knows. He worked it out on his own and she confirmed it. Is she there now?

He doesn't know which wall or where.

 _Yes_. Slowly. Cautiously. That's where she is right now. So he's thinking he'll actually go there?

Flare of irritation, and he knows irritation is the seed of rage, and he clutches at himself, claws back those rising spikes, the swelling heat. If he blows up now there's no way he goes anywhere at all. If he loses control she'll discard whatever fragile trust she's beginning to accumulate. He'll shatter it and it'll be useless to her, and next time he wants it, it might very well not be there. He doesn't know how you stop a _seizure_ , if it can even be done, but he has to. He can be all right. He doesn't have a choice.

Marvelous that suddenly he gives a shit about that.

What the fuck is going _on?_

Yes. Through clenched teeth. Tight jaw. Hands curled into aching fists at his sides. Maybe bleeding again; he isn't going to look down to check. Isn't going to call attention to it. Focused on her instead, and thinking about gripping those thick lovely dreadlocks and yanking as hard as he can, yanking her head down and to the side and listening to the bones in her neck pop. The texture of her hair against his palm. Whether or not she would scream. Whether or not he could actually kill her that way or if it would take something additional to finish her off.

And for the first time, a tiny and bizarrely familiar voice whispers that maybe he's thinking about this with such lavish vividness so that he doesn't actually do it.

Ridiculous. That is absolutely fucking _ridiculous_. He thinks about these things and then he does them. He thinks about killing and then he kills. It's happened hundreds of times.

Since he got here?

Has he?

Yes. Yes, he's thinking he'll _actually go there._ Is there a problem? Was he condemned to house arrest when he wasn't looking? Slips past his pitiful filters, he can't stop it - in an abrupt sneer: Hasn't he been _good_ lately?

 _Fuck._

But she's simply looking at him. Frowning, but it's a thoughtful frown. And then speaking, again slowly and with careful deliberation: One of Deanna's conditions of his _probation_ is that he not go anywhere unaccompanied. They didn't fight her on it. It seemed reasonable and compromises were necessary. Wry smile; even Rick contained himself enough to see the sense in that.

She knows he's been going out alone, here and there. They all know. Haven't called him on it yet, because that's a potential battle no one was prepared to pick, but now she's going to. So no, there isn't exactly a _problem,_ but like hell he's just strolling out there.

Pause. He waits. Somehow without meaning to he's staggered into a place of internal calm, a clearing in a dark and treacherous forest, the eye of a wrathful hurricane, and he has the presence of - a broken - mind to stay here for as long as he can.

If he wants to go, she'll take him. And he doesn't come back by himself. Another pause. Cocked head, mouth a firm line. Those are _her_ conditions. Does he accept them?

He doesn't know how it can be, but the rest of the world around him is quiet as well. He's here inside himself. No clarity, but closer than he has been.

Yes. He accepts. The truth is that it seems entirely reasonable to him as well. He doesn't _like_ it, but he doesn't like much of anything. _Dislike_ is now his baseline. It's good enough if he isn't feeling furious hatred.

Okay.

 _C'mon._

* * *

It's weird, walking with her.

It's weird because it's actually not so weird.

He remembers. Not much, but fragments, and the fragments are as vivid as anything his imagination constructs. He was going somewhere with her, just the two of them. Forest. Roads. Empty broken buildings, small town streets, and a shack in the deep woods that became important later for some reason he can't recall at the moment. Walkers, but they were a distraction. Fighting with her at his back and that felt good. Again the weight of the bow in his hands and the sun-flare of her sword. He trusted her then.

They were searching for something.

The houses around him with their white trim and red brick, clean wood, the trees, street, green lawns and neat hedges, glimpse of the wall here and there and the rasp of crows and jays in the branches, low gray light falling over everything and leaching out the color, but he's back in the dappled sunlight and the cool shadows, moving with purpose with her beside him, and it hurts.

It's better when he doesn't remember. Meeting the rest of them reemphasized that.

But could be he said something aloud, because she's talking, grabbing him and pulling him back to the _now_ , and unwillingly he goes.

So he does remember that? Yeah, they did that. For a while. She's quiet a moment, chewing at her lip. They were looking for the Governor. He was out there, fucking _out there,_ and the idea of letting him go was more than she could stand. And he helped her.

She's still angry. It's restrained and it has all the smooth edges of an old scar, but it's there. She's murderously angry. Part of her always will be. He senses this with total comprehension.

The Governor. Yeah, something about that. About that shack. Hands at his sides and his fingers are back to picking at themselves, nails digging under loose skin and trying to peel it back. Something about that and _her,_ and pain. A lot of it.

 _The Governor rolled right up to our gates._

 _Maybe if I wouldn't have stopped looking._

So maybe she's angry at him too. He recognizes this with placid acceptance. She wouldn't be the first person to be angry at him for his many failings. Christ, honey, get the fuck in line.

They found him, in the end.

She glances at him. He can't read her expression. _Yeah. We did._

Then, and it's awful and he falters and almost stops and turns around and goes straight back: _You know it wasn't your fault._

He wants to pounce on her. Take her down. Rip at her face with his nails, gouge her eyes. She wouldn't miss them when he took them out; she's fucking blind already if she can't see that it's his fault. What precisely the fuck is she talking about? He _stopped looking_. He told her that she should stop too. They would have found him, he knows they would. He was out there and they would have tracked him down. It was only a matter of time. She can't be that stupid. Nothing about her has ever indicated to him that she's so stupid. She might be one of the few people left who isn't. So why is she saying such unbelievably stupid things?

Unless she's lying, trying to make him _feel better,_ in which case she can go directly to hell and proceed to fuck herself with her own fucking sword.

Takes him a few seconds to realize she's stopped. He stops too, turns to face her as the misery of revelation winds around his gut. Lost it in the end anyway. Lost control. He's not all right, can't be, and he was never going to fool her. She's going to realize her mistake and take him back now. And he'll go with her, won't protest or resist, because yeah, it was a mistake. Is. He doesn't belong out here. Shouldn't try.

But she's not moving.

 _Look at me._ He does. He has no idea where else he could possibly look. And the world is in flames around her, bodies writhing and screaming and cackling in the wreckage as they burn, as they crawl toward the two of them, but she's standing there, unflinching, and all at once he doubts that it's ignorance of the state of the world. Thinks it's not impossible that if he told her the world was on fire, she would believe him.

She's standing here like this because she's not afraid.

 _Look at me._ He does. _I'm not stupid. Don't you dare call me stupid. What I am, Daryl, is right. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, except_ his _. It happened. It was always going to happen. We couldn't have stopped it. We're strong, but we're not that strong._

 _The world goes to shit and you deal with it. You know that. You know that better than most people._

 _You were one of the people who dealt with it the best. Sure, it knocked you on your ass, but you always got back up. You got up when most people would have stayed down. That was only one reason why I trusted you._

 _I want to trust you again._

Looks at her. Looks down at the boots that are not his. This is the kind of situation in which a cliched maxim is probably appropriate. Muttered: _yeah well wish in one hand shit in the other_

Sigh. _I'm not wishing. I'm wanting. I'll either get what I want or I won't. I think a lot of that is up to you._ She faces forward, and before he has time to catch up with the movement, she's walking again. _C'mon if you're coming._

He watches her. Watches her back, straight spine, those purposeful strides, the hard grace in her muscle and bone. No, he has never detected any indication that she's stupid. She has smoothness but no dull edges. He has never detected any indication that she's anything but as sharp as the blade of her sword.

He can't trust her. But maybe he can come closer than with most people. Maybe she's not lying to him. Maybe she wouldn't do that.

His hands are loose at his sides. He follows.

* * *

The clouds are heavier. Lower. Denser. She sits with her rifle on her knees, legs dangling over the edge of the wall, and leans back and watches them thicken and descend. There's a quality of inevitability about them that's almost comforting, like she doesn't need to concern herself with something over which she has no control. Rain is doubtful - they don't look like those kinds of clouds - so she'll merely be under them. She'll exist.

Once that was very difficult.

More than once.

A wind sifts through the trees, pulls strands of her hair free from her ponytail and toys with them, tickles her cheeks and nose. She closes her eyes, leans into it. She doesn't braid her hair much anymore, hasn't in a long time, but this morning she thought about it - not with any real intent but merely remembering that once it was a thing she did.

Took pleasure in. All those pretty little delicacies.

What he thought of them, to the extent that he noticed them at all.

She'll go see him again tonight. She might go see him after her shift is done, so later this afternoon. He was quiet when she left him, quiet and - as far as she could see - pensive in the confused manner he has now. Not in agony. Not enraged or violently despairing or lost in a deeper, more weary despair to the point where he can barely move. He said goodnight to her. Low, sounded distracted, and when she glanced at him he seemed to be looking beyond her into a corner of the room, and focused on something she couldn't see. But not terrified of whatever it was.

He _sees things._ She's just going to have to get used to that.

He said goodnight to her and caught her hand as she rose, before she could walk away. Caught her hand and held on, wordless, and his grip was gentle.

It was him. Fractured and badly incomplete, and sad at his incompletion, but he was there. His attention. His need to connect, the intensity of his desire to do so. One of the few things she ever saw him truly want.

His love.

Things like that are horrible, because things like that make her hope.

So she'll go see him, and she'll spend as long with him as he wants.

Except suddenly he's there.

Climbing up the ladder, his head poking above the edge. She gapes at him. Wonders if he's real. It's absurd, him in this setting with no warning whatsoever, and something about the absurdity kicks a laugh out of her - a rough bark that doesn't sound much like her, and he freezes, frowns.

He already appeared very uncertain. Nervous. He probably feels the absurdity as well.

"What?"

"Nothin'. I just… I didn't expect you." She clears her throat and watches him as he climbs awkwardly up the rest of the way and hesitates at the top, scanning around with dark, hooded eyes. He's more than nervous. He's scared. He doesn't want to be here.

But here he is.

He swings his unstable gaze back to her. "You want me to tell you I'm comin'?"

Genuinely asking. He wants to know if he did something wrong, if he should do things differently. There's a sincerity in it, an earnestness that - once again - is so purely _him,_ that for a moment she can't speak. Can hardly breathe.

"You don't gotta ask my permission." She cranes her neck as he makes his way to her, peers over the edge. Michonne down there, walking away. "Michonne bring you?"

He ducks his head. Not quite a nod. "Said I shouldn't go anywhere without someone."

"You okay with that?"

He shrugs. Doesn't move. She realizes that he's waiting to be directed, and she swallows the lump in her throat as she inclines her head at the spot beside her. So he sinks down and sits crosslegged, hands in his lap and fingers twitching, and not looking at much of anything. His eyes have lost focus again. They wander, distant. Perhaps he's gone away.

But not too far. She would know if he had.

"Deanna was worried."

"I know." If he was gone, he's back. He lets out a rough, anemic sound that could be the bones of a laugh. "She ain't wrong."

"You keep goin' like you're goin' and she'll relax."

He stares at her, not only focused but razor-sharp. Pointed like a bolt aimed squarely at her. Nonplussed far more than angry, but anger is there, lurking in his shadows. Not that it's ever gone. And she knows what he must be thinking: His catastrophic migraines, his horrific hallucinations, his fits of rage, threatening to murder a baby with his bare hands, the ongoing bloody destruction of those hands in question.

Though they look a bit better today, scabs mostly unbroken and skin not quite as raw. And they're unbandaged. Someone must feel like the bandages aren't absolutely necessary.

Even so. Plus there's the fact that she's still not positive that he won't eventually try to kill her.

"Don't fuck with me." Not dangerous, not like his lurking anger might be about to whip out and strike her. He's pleading. He's begging her. _Please don't do that to me._

She shakes her head. "I'm not." Whatever she sees, whatever he knows, the others haven't seen those things the way she has or come into the knowledge he possesses, and they'll draw their own conclusions. Especially if she says nothing. If _Rick_ says nothing. If Denise is careful about what she does say. There's everything off the paper, and then there's the paper itself. The ledger of his observable actions. "You haven't tried to hurt anyone, not really. You haven't lost control."

"I _have._ " The pleading is worse, and it punches through her stomach wall. "How the fuck can you _say_ that?" He looks at her, features wrenched into a desperate grimace, and she thinks he might be about to grab her and shake her just to prove his point. But that's not something he wouldn't have done before. "What about Rick? What about…" Eyes distant again. _Receded._ He's searching for something, searching frantically. Then he snaps back in. "What about Judith?"

"You didn't do it."

"Fuckin' hell, you _that_ dumb? I _woulda_."

She lays a hand on his arm. He stiffens but he doesn't jerk away, and she briefly reflects on how easily she's slipping back into a version of herself she often believes is completely gone. How strange that is. "I'm not so sure that's true."

"It's true." But he doesn't sound so sure either. His voice wobbles, breaks at the end. He drops his eyes and squeezes his fists closed.

"You've been talkin' to Denise. Yeah, I know it's been rough. But you've been doin' it." She strokes her fingers down his bare forearm and he shivers. "You've been workin' on the bike. The other day, you saw everyone. _Everyone._ You didn't try to break it down, do it one day at a time." The monumental effort it probably took. The determination. The sheer force of will.

And what it very possibly did to him, that effort. Lying in the grass in pain excruciating enough to paralyze him.

Standing in that tiny upstairs room, looking at him sprawled on the bed and drowned in sleep that came out of a needle, telling Denise that she hopes, she thinks he's getting better, and then it only gets worse. That he rises only to fall even further.

But she hopes anyway.

"So?"

"So someone's gonna look at you and see someone who's tryin'." She sighs, closes her eyes. She's not certain how much of this is a lie. Maybe none of it. Maybe all. Or the equivalent of saying _You can fool them. They'll look at you and have no idea what's really going on._ "They're gonna see someone who's gettin' better."

He lifts his gaze to hers again. Dark, darker than it was. It's still him, he's still not looking at her with those eyes that seem to want to split her open and crawl inside, but what's there is enough to transfer that shiver from him into her. "What about you?"

She draws a slow breath. Here it is, then. "What about me?"

He cocks his head. Animal. Eyes narrowed. "You know what."

 _What about how I want to eat you alive?_

He knows she knows.

"You're not gonna hurt me," she says quietly. She sounds like she believes it. "You promised."

For a second she thinks he might respond. With what, she can't begin to imagine. Doesn't much care to. But then he looks away, off and out over the trees and broken houses beyond the wall, and the wire wrapped around her spinal column loosens.

"You're gettin' better," she repeats, just as quiet. "She's gonna see it."

Nothing. No sign that he even heard her. He sits motionless, blank, and her hand falls away.

"Don't you want that?"

"You like it up here?"

Not even pretending it's not a dodge. It's not clumsy redirection by accident. It's not clumsy because he can't do better. It's clumsy because he doesn't _care,_ and she sighs again and follows the direction of his flat gaze. "Yeah. I do." She pauses for a beat. "I can think better up here."

He nods. "It's like it can't touch you."

He doesn't have to specify. He's correct. It's like it can't. The world. Everything. She has her gun and her aim and she can take anything out before it can get to her.

"I'm good at it. Shootin'."

"Show me."

There's something in his tone, something both utterly foreign and deeply familiar, and after a few seconds it hits her: he's teasing. Or something like teasing. Like he's never done it before but he read about it, or someone described it to him, and he's seeing if he can pull it off. Calling her bluff. Considering it a bluff in the first place.

Like he's trying to be who he was. Who he isn't anymore.

But she doesn't entirely credit herself. "Huh?"

"You heard me." Ghost of a smile. All of him is a ghost. He's a living echo, swelling and dying away. "Show me whatcha got, Greene."

 _All right._

She feels her breastbone cracking as she raises the rifle, sights a raccoon bumbling around in the shadows of one of the more distant houses, squeezes the trigger. That icily satisfying _crack_ and it collapses, a little dark form in the grass. All of this happens in the span it takes for her to blink three times.

The guy further along the wall to her right starts, but immediately goes back to his own meditations. It's common knowledge that now and then she takes potshots. No one is inclined to try to make her stop.

Wise.

Daryl is silent. She lowers the rifle and allows him to be so.

Finally, so soft she almost misses it: "I could tell you were good."

She doesn't know what to say. She says nothing at all. It's fine, because he continues. A bit louder. "With the bow. Was too heavy for you, but…" He trails off, shrugs. His hair is hanging in his face. She can't see his eyes now. "Woulda been really good with the right one. And practice."

She manages a whisper. His name. He releases a long, shaky breath. Still not crying, where once he probably would have been.

She wonders if he ever does anymore.

"I practice now."

"Yeah."

He doesn't say anything else. Clearly doesn't want to. And she doesn't try to make him, until it's time to go home.

* * *

If anything is good anymore, he's willing to count this.

And also bad, because it hurt. All of it hurt. Being there with her hurt, talking scratched at his throat like tiny rodent claws, and his hands throbbed. Eyes throbbed too, after a while, and behind them - especially the left side. The light. It never got too awful, but by the time she got up he was more than ready to leave. He was very tired. Sitting like that, he didn't even know for how long because the time melted into a kind of flowing formlessness, but every one of his muscles felt strained, as if he was using them in ways he never does.

Hungry, too.

Different kind of hungry. Odd. Sense of _wanting_ that he doesn't recall feeling before, and it unsettles him. He wants to make it go away.

Wants to eat and lie down in the dark and sleep, or just try to not think about anything at all, and it's likely that he'll fail but apparently this is his day for attempting things.

She didn't try to make conversation for the rest of the time up there and she doesn't now as she walks beside him, and that's also something he's willing to count as good. Like last night, simple. _Can we not talk?_ Yes, they can not. She'll grant him that, yet another of many favors. He should be grateful.

For now he is. Later, perhaps, he'll go back to hating her.

Mid-afternoon. The clouds are starting to thin, sunlight piercing them here and there - another reason why it's good that they're going. That, he knows, would be too much. That would ruin everything, and he's getting so tired of being held by her while pain takes him apart from the inside out. It's getting so old. Tedious.

She must think so too. Even if she does love him. Even if that impossibility is possible.

He knows the way, and even if he didn't, she's with him and can guide him. He can allow his attention to drift, which is a relief in itself, because focusing it on any one thing takes energy. He can allow his wandering, meandering mind to wander and meander, no purpose or order, receiving input now and then but half oblivious in any conscious way.

Good.

And then a man he doesn't know walks by him carrying a large box of ammunition.

 _Hmm._

He doesn't pause - not at first. Spots the label on the box, and even if reading is difficult for him now, he knows it when he sees it. Has spent enough time looking for things like it on runs, back when he did runs, and he does remember that. It's ammunition of the kind _her_ rifle takes. Which makes sense. It must come from somewhere.

Not really worth paying his highly limited attention to.

Except then there's a voice, the voice of the man with the box - _where's this going?_ \- and another voice he doesn't recognize rising in faint exasperation - _armory, where the hell else? -_ and an instinct he doesn't care to fight makes him turn his head in time to see the man with the box go up to the door of a utilitarian-looking building and pass through.

Armory.

Rick keeps his gun very close. So does _she._ And the Boy. They all do. He's noticed this, noted their presence, understood the virtual impossibility of him gaining access to any of them and dismissed it. Didn't want to anyway, not particularly. He doesn't much care for guns. Got along just fine without them when he was on the road.

But nevertheless, _armory._ There are guns in there. Almost certainly a few. Possibly many.

Possibly enough that no one would notice right away if one went missing.

He notices this. Notes it.

Files it away.


	34. an open mouth screams and makes no sound

**Note:** So we're definitely in the final few chapters. I said I wasn't going to let people know when exactly the ending was coming, and I'm not, but I will say that we're approaching it, and pieces are sliding into place for the finale.

I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to shell out the final two or three chapters. I will say that I'm thinking right now that I'll follow the I'll Be Yours For a Song model somewhat, and write them ahead of time so people aren't waiting so long between them. I'm not sure I'll post them all at once. We'll have to see. What I'll promise is that while I'm probably going to be cruel about it, I'll try to not be too cruel.

I did say at the beginning of this horrorshow that there would be authorial cruelty.

And I'm also going to continue to be manipulative. Some of that is simply because I'm a jerk, but as I've said before, most of it is that I'm trying to convey the sheer terror of being in someone's mind when they literally don't know what's real and what isn't. Which is probably the most terrifying thing I can think of.

Along those lines, for anyone interested in these things, a pretty significant mood/aesthetic influence at the moment is the film _They Look Like People,_ which is amazing and moving and has the honor of being the only horror film in my adult life that I had to stop watching until I could finish it with someone else in the room. It's not gory. It's not jump scare-y. It's just flat-out terrifying, and emotionally powerful in ways I didn't at all expect. It's on Netflix right now, and if you see it, I think you'll immediately see why and how it's related to this story.

Okay, shutting up now. On with the horror. Thank you so much for (still) being here. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 34: an open mouth screams and makes no sound**

 _I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I'd just as soon kill you myself, I say._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She has the gun.

She knows it so well by now. She knows it before the hallway comes into any kind of focus - not that it ever comes into full focus at all - because she _feels_ it, the cold weight of it, the density of the death waiting inside it. In the worst way possible, it's comforting, because it means certainty. It means an end.

It means it's finally going to stop.

She tightens her fingers around the grip, blinking in the light. As always, the light is _wrong,_ all the lines and angles wrong, because this is where everything _went_ wrong, where nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen. This is Ground Zero, where the bomb in her life went off, megatons to surpass watching her mother and big brother stagger dead out of the barn or her father's head rolling bloody into the grass. She believed nothing could ever be that bad, and then Daryl Dixon was killed in front of her and she had to reassess everything that _bad_ could ever mean.

 _Wrong._

She was so wrong.

Now she has the gun, and they're all standing around her, standing in that quiet calm tableau they always occupy and to which they confine themselves, because none of them matter. They're removed from this, unimportant, inconsequential. They had nothing to do with it in the end, not even Rick, because he made his move after it was already over. The world includes _him_ and _her_ and nothing else. Not even Dawn is in this place, other than as a shade somewhere behind her.

Except the tableau is also wrong.

They're always blurry, always faceless. That in itself isn't unusual by now. But they're more than that, as she looks around; they're dark and getting darker, sinking into shadows, not frozen outside the bounds of this world her mind has constructed but _inside_ it, part of it, watching her. Silent observers with unseen eyes.

They don't mean well. Their intentions are not good. She knows this just as one knows anything in a dream: with confidence as hard as bone. Too icy to be anger and too bloodless to be hate, but they're staring at her with the deepest malevolence she's ever felt, and utterly inhuman. Alien. Beyond her understanding.

She looks down at the gun in her hand. She can't fight them. She can't run. She never could, not from this. This has to happen regardless, and it's not just that she loves him. It's not just that he deserves mercy. It's not just that he deserves to be set free.

It's that it never could have gone any other way.

Now he's there on his knees in front of her, exhausted, shaking with agony, covered in filth and old blood, all rags and torn skin. Him as he truly is, as all he can ever be, which is only one of the many reasons why it's cruel to make him try be something else. He's groping at her with the infected disasters that are his hands, and weak, dry sobs are wrenching out of him.

Though when he raises his head, chewed lips moving, there are still no tears.

 _Please. Please get it right this time. Please make it stop. Please make me better._

 _Make me all right._

Taking his hand in hers, so gentle because she doesn't want to hurt him worse - and this won't hurt. That's the point. This is going to end the hurting. Other hand raising the gun and pressing the muzzle against his forehead, where she knows there won't be any mistakes, where nothing will go wrong. The shadows around them have receded, and like it should be, it's only him and her and this one last thing she can do for him.

 _I love you._ Soft, shaking. Him. Her. She doesn't know and it doesn't matter; it's true either way. She loves him this much, her love is this strong.

Strong enough to let him go.

 _I love you._

She hates goodbyes. So does he. So she doesn't say it. She pulls the trigger and it's not even very loud, though it echoes into her ears, and she sees the blood spattered all over the floor, a tiny bomb gone off and flinging his head back as she releases his hand and he crumples and comes to rest in the expanding pool of his blood and at last is still.

This is where she should leave. Where normally she would. She's closing her eyes, expecting to.

She doesn't.

She stares down at him, gun trembling like the rest of her. The light seems to be dimming, the shadows abruptly closing in - slow, very slow, but even if she sees them only on the edges of her vision, she knows. The light is somehow dimming, yes, but also brightening, harsh and garish, beating against her eyes and making them sting like tears.

His hand twitches.

She's frozen. She gapes at it. At him. Twitching fingers sliding through his blood, twitching like she saw when he was standing in the street that night and looking at her. No. _No,_ he can't turn. She shot him in the fucking head, there's no _way_ he can turn, but then his entire body jerks, bucks upward in an arch that makes her think nauseatingly of an orgasm, and he's rising onto his knees with a smoothness that no human ever has or ever could possess, looking up at her with blood trickling down his face, and what she sees there…

He's gone. All the light of Hell is in his eyes.

His pupils twitch like his fingers and grow, expanding to devour the whites in a single snap. His eyes are pits, black, huge and growing, growing like the hideously cheerful smile spreading across his face far wider than a smile should be, smiling fit to split his face in two, and when he parts his lips, rusty razor blades shine in that awful light. And she knows without having to see it that he's fully erect and hard like a diamond blade, ready to stab and impale and rip her apart from the inside.

He traveled six hundred miles for her. Tracked her. Hunted. He's very hungry. He's starving.

He's going to feed.

* * *

Shadows.

Shadows aren't stopped by walls or gates. Shadows are everywhere and they come and go according to their own whims. He knew them. Became intimate with them like friends, like lovers, like himself, because they were all those things and so much more. They walked with him. Clothed him and covered him. Hid him and sheltered him. Protected him, kept him company, whispered to him out of the dark. Horrible things lurked inside them but he never blamed them for that - might as well blame a snake for biting, and anyway wasn't he a horrible thing too?

Didn't he belong there? With them?

The walls don't keep them out. They're with him when he gets up from his nest and emerges from his room and drifts silently through the sleeping house, the flames for once died back and the crawling horrors quiet in their holes in the world. He feels big. His eyes feel big, his hands, throbbing with pain but also with what they can do. What they might do.

What they're going to do.

He's growing into the world, swelling with the shadows as they fill him. He welcomes them. Wouldn't be able to fight them even if he wanted to, which he doesn't, because he needs them for this. What he's decided, this plan even when he doesn't _do_ plans anymore because plans on the whole can't be trusted and have a tendency to get you shot in the fucking head.

He realizes, bare feet crushing grass cool and damp with dew, that this plan might _also_ result in him getting shot in the fucking head, and he wants to double over with laughter, muffling hysterical giggles with his hand.

Not like he hasn't been through it before. He shouldn't assume that getting shot in the head will actually do very much to him.

Not only the shadows are with him. There's the moon. He slides easily from darkness to darkness but turns his eyes up to her light, wishes he could go out into it and bathe himself, though he can't take chances. Can't risk getting caught, and they do keep a watch even in the small hours. On the way out isn't such a problem, will likely only prevent him from doing what he's planning to do, but on the way back is a whole other story, because that's going to be kind of hard to explain. They'd lock him up again.

Worse, maybe.

He can't believe that once he wanted to go _back_ into that fucking cell, crawling out of it like a sack. Or he can believe it of himself, but he loathes that person now, possibly more than he loathes every other person he's ever been and the person he is at this very moment. He's extremely worth loathing. Consider what he's doing, what it means.

Christ, she's so fucking _stupid,_ it grinds his teeth to powder. It hurts. It hurts because she shouldn't be.

And he can't protect her from it. She has to suffer the consequences like everyone else.

Shadow to shadow beneath trees and the eaves of houses, thanking each, torn hands spread into them. Cool as the grass, rougher pavement matching it in temperature under the soles of his feet. Came so far like this, and he can go another short distance that way, no problem. He's aware that it might end up being for nothing, that the place might be guarded specifically or that it might be locked, that _probably_ it's locked, except he doesn't quite believe that. It will be unlocked. He knows this.

Knows it like in a dream.

They're all stupid, fattened on petty luxuries, slow and far too trusting. That they've let him stay here this long is more than ample evidence of that. If they were smart they would kick his ass out the gates. If they were _really_ smart they'd shoot him in the fucking head but we've already established that doing so might not have much of an effect in the end. The damage is done. Done with months ago.

He died once. Still not sure you get to do that twice.

His mind is wandering again. That's fine. His feet know the way, and his eyes can watch for watchers watching _him_.

They're stupid and slow and fat and trusting, oblivious, only Rick and Michonne and Carol and the Boy possessing anything _like_ a correct understanding of the realities of their situation - and _her,_ always _her,_ even if she's such an idiot as to love him she sees a great many things more clearly than the rest - and they wouldn't lock the armory because it wouldn't occur to them that such a threat could come from their midst, and after the attack they apparently suffered, they'd want fast access to weapons without someone needing to hunt around for a key.

They're prepared - or they think they are - for an attack from outside the walls. But walls don't keep out shadows. And they allowed a snake slither into their fool's paradise. Their Eden.

Lights, but none of them are ever particularly bright. Windows all dark. Shapes on the walls, dim, but of course they aren't facing inward. Aren't even glancing in his direction. Scorn flares into hot contempt bursts into poisonous murderous rage as he crouches in one of the thicker shadows, peeling scabs off his knuckles and gnawing at them. They should fucking _die,_ all of them, none of them belong here, none of them deserve this parody of the old dead world, it's not _right_ that they're here, and _right_ is in itself a tale told by an idiot but it's still true.

They should all be slaughtered, trapped by their walls, sheep in a pen. Strung up and bled out and gutted. They should all burn.

And then he could go to her and have her, and keep her with him. He could take her into the dark - where she belongs too - and hold her close forever. Never let her go. Like it was supposed to be.

Well. First things first.

He's very close, and it doesn't take more than another minute or so of careful navigation to arrive at the door. The shadows have obliged him and cloaked the doorway, and if he's quick and quiet he won't be detected. It was a house, once, but he looks up and surveys it and sees nothing to indicate that it's currently being used that way, and even if it is, it makes little difference. He'll be quick. He'll be quiet.

They won't stop him. He knows that too. Because he's supposed to do this. This is supposed to happen.

It never could have gone any other way.

The door opens at his touch and he goes in.

Boards creak under his feet but not much, and he's not worried. The shadows extend into what was obviously once a front hall, not unlike the one in Rick's house though devoid of any real furnishing or decoration, and the layout doesn't seem identical but it also isn't unfamiliar. He stands for a moment, scenting the air - not that he can smell a gun but he can sense other things when they're there to sense. Sweat. Breath. Life. Has before, out there. Didn't only hunt animals.

At least as far as the immediate area goes, he's alone.

Good. Simple, then.

His instincts aren't always honest with him but they lie to him a fuck of a lot less than pretty much anyone or anything else, and inasmuch as he trusts anything at all, he trusts them. Now they're hissing _right right_ and he turns that way, goes through that door, and there they are, _yes,_ and he doesn't care for guns but even he has to halt for a moment and take in the glory of what he's seeing, bathed in moonlight and one of the dim lamps just outside the window.

Not just a few guns. A lot of guns. No just handguns but shotguns, assault rifles, at least one sniper rifle that he can see. Not a ridiculous number, but plenty for a place this size. Wonders where they got them all from. Seems to recall Rick saying something about stocking up after the attack, getting way more aggressive about runs, taking out more than one person to get what they had, but it doesn't fucking _matter_ where they came from.

All that matters is that they're _here_. Room full of cold, smooth, decisive death. A banquet of it. Christ, he could take his pick and probably no one would notice for a while.

No. No, that's not true. There are fewer of the big ones, he sees as he moves closer to the racks, reaches out a hand to trail his ragged fingertips over them. One of those would be missed. But there are more handguns, also set back further from the door, closer to a corner by stacked boxes of ammunition, and it's much more likely that he would have some time with one of those before someone discovered its absence.

And anyway, how fucking _big_ does he _need?_ Anything he could possibly want to use it for wouldn't require a fucking assault rifle. He chides himself. That's ridiculous. This is very exciting to be sure but get a hold of yourself. Get a fucking grip.

Grip. Heavy and cold in his hand, cradled in his palm. Had one once. Remembers. Never liked it much even then, or at least it was never his preference, but he was good with it because he was good with anything that required aim. Not as good as her, but then again, how could he be?

Squeezes his eyes shut, squeezes the gun as his chest turns itself inside out, bloody and glistening.

She's so fucking good. She's good and he's sick, what he's doing, this is so _sick_ even if he doesn't have a plan, even if he's not sure what this is even for, but he's doing it anyway. Something broke that night with the mirror and something terrible is riding him around like a fucking horse, has been for some time now, and he can't stop it, can't _make_ it stop, he's not _all right,_ he should stick a shell in one of those shotguns and _shove it in his fucking mouth._

Breathe.

Not all right but he can be.

And he's come this far.

Weight of the gun like an anchor. A center. A gravity well he can fall around, spiraling ever-downward. This is it. This is right. He has what he came for. He can't linger.

He has to go.

The shadows carry him silently back into the dark.

* * *

He puts it down on the floor in a pool of moonlight and sits and stares at it, his breath locked in the cage of his chest. He sits and he stares at it and he tries to understand what he's fucking done.

He could take it back. He could go now before the sun rises, before the sky begins to lighten and the shadows flee. He could probably make it, and like the reverse of the journey to get it, he only truly has to worry about being caught on the way there. He could do that, he _should,_ because what the ever-living _fuck_ is he doing with a fucking _gun?_

He's insane. That's what he's doing with it. That's why he has it now. He's utterly insane and his fundamental motivations are a mystery to him. He is ultimately incomprehensible.

(Long ago he gave up on any genuine understanding of himself, not because he believes he is incapable of understanding but because he is settled in the certainty that there is quite simply nothing to understand. His mind is a storm of chaos, devoid of logic or reason, and whatever choices he makes or actions he takes are therefore inherently absurd. His life is meaningless. His death was meaningless. He is meaningless. Everything is meaningless.)

(The knowledge is the most perverse kind of comfort. At least when it comes to this he doesn't have to try.)

No. Don't go back. Don't give it back. He's shaking, looking at it, teeth chattering and clammy sweat breaking out on his brow and in his palms. He _wants_ it. He wants what it means, what it is, he wants that sweet cold death sleeping inside it. He's close to it in a way he hasn't been in such a long time. It's like he's holding a shard of glass, his veins pulsing so near the surface, facing this option in the most direct way possible. Previously he considered it just that: an option. No more significant than any other. Now he considers it and he feels marrow-deep _lust._

Of course. It's obvious. Knew it before, but he didn't. Not really. Not like this.

Didn't _want._

He took one of the smallest ones. It's so small now, lying there in the pale light. It's such a little thing. Much smaller than what killed him. But it's all right. It would probably be enough. Even if he's died once, he can probably do it again. _Especially_ since he has. He's had first-hand experience. It's really not that hard.

He is, though.

Oh.

 _Fuck_.

He realizes it all at once in a single searing throb of blood from the base of his skull straight down his core and into his cock. He's _rock_ -hard, doesn't know how long he's been like that but it's possible he has all damn night and is only noticing it now, and he doesn't take his eyes off the gun as he drops a hand between his legs and cups himself through his pants. Squeezes. Whimpers softly. Running his gaze over the thing like his fingers, like his tongue, the sensuous delight of cool metal and the heat of his cock under his palm as he gives it another slow squeeze.

He was hard before, nights ago, thinking of _her_. Like this, only he was naked and sitting in the moonlight with his disgusting body purified in its glow, his disgusting desperate urges, the thought of his heat and her heat and plunging into her, melting into her and her into him, through skin and flesh and muscle and bone. Stripping it all back, opening her, laying her out beneath him. So red and soft and wet. So beautiful.

He punished himself for it, tightened his hand around his shaft until he could no longer differentiate at all between the pleasure and the pain. Didn't stroke, didn't jerk; he merely _clenched_ until the exquisite agony bent him double and he thought his balls might burst and splatter bloody sperm all over the floor.

He had to do that, or he would have had to bite his own fucking fingers off and crunch the bones between his teeth.

But this is different. It's not her.

It's just him.

It's him and it's _it_ and his mouth is flooding with bitter saliva as he gazes at it, thick with arousal, though of course his eyes are dry as Death Valley. It, grip and barrel and muzzle and his fingers working his belt open and tugging his zipper down, and he's reaching for it at the same time as he wriggles his fingers into his fly and draws out his cock aching and already slick with precome. Gets it in his hand. Both things in his hands. Wants to laugh. Wants to fucking sob, fingers wrapped firmly around his shaft as he lifts the gun in the other and turns it on himself, looks into that singular lidless eye.

He was fucked when that cop whore pulled the trigger. Skull-fucked.

He was fucked to death.

He doesn't need to check that it's loaded. He loaded it before he took it, then double-checked to make sure it actually happened. It's loaded and there's a round in the chamber, and placed right, it'll only take one. The moonlight is blinding him as he gives himself a rough, trembling stroke and then another and he shudders with how fucking _good_ it feels, pleasure like the storm pounding against the insides of his head, lightning crisping his nerves. His fingers are scorching prints into flesh roaring with infected blood. Glancing down; he's seen this before, patchy flaking skin and running sores, foreskin peeling loosely back to reveal a bulbous gray head and a slit dripping pus.

Dripping and bobbing above her spread legs as she fumbled and clawed and snarled at him to fuck her, _fuck_ her, _stick your fat cock in my pussy and FUCK ME._

 _Stop._

No. He's not stopping. He's moving firmer and faster as he raises the gun to his lips and trails them along the barrel, flicks out his tongue, tastes oil and steel, and he almost shatters his teeth on it and shrieks the lining of his throat away as he thinks of Rick, what he said to Rick before he tried to break his wrist. _Who did you get to suck your dick?_

Thinks of that and the tears in Rick's eyes, the surge of nauseating power knowing he could cause that kind of pain to someone like this man.

Make someone he loves hurt the way he does.

Fuck, no; hurl the gun across the room, hurl _himself_ across the room and try to bludgeon himself unconscious against the wall, gouge his eyes out, _anything_ except keep doing what he's doing. Jerking off with a gun in his hand and thinking about how _shit,_ it would be so easy to finish what the cop whore started, it would be so fucking easy like this to finally make it stop. Ejaculate a bullet into his brain and be done and gone.

Be better.

Peals of laughter from the corners of this hateful room, the eyeless skinless things creeping toward him out of shadows turned traitor and sloughing off rotting bits of themselves as they come, the deafening drone of the flies crawling in and out of his ears to lay their eggs inside him. Every word a death rattle, a friendly suggestion that he take a good long look at himself right now, because this is the cancerous heart of it, the final ruinous truth: he's not a _good person_ who's _trying_ and _getting better,_ and he's not a razor-toothed demon who rips apart cats and babies and is going to take the woman he loves and fuck her to death and eat her alive her while he does. He isn't anything remotely close to that impressive.

He's just a very sick man.

And sooner or later he's going to kill someone. Because he's still a killer. And sooner or later he kills everyone.

He hasn't stopped. Hasn't missed a fucking beat. If anything he's even harder, the gun pressed against his lips and precome smeared over his fingers, the wet smack of his own hand like a jackhammer beneath the thin whines bleeding through his bared teeth. He doesn't know if this is even pleasure anymore. Doesn't think it's pain. It's mounting release, it's the bullet sliding into the chamber, and he doesn't give a fuck that they're going to find him like this with his fly down and his soft, pathetic little dick still clutched in one hand and the gun loose in his other. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that he's given himself what he needs to _make it stop._

Circle of pointing shadow-hands and a ring of glittering smiles as he thrusts the gun into his mouth, so far in that he feels the muzzle jab his soft palate, bottoming out against the back of his own throat, and every fractured part of him screams _oh fuck YES_ and blows straight through the top of his head as he pulls the trigger.

It clicks softly as warm, sticky come pumps over his fist.

For a long time he doesn't move except for his shivering and his heaving breaths, until they subside into nothing. Then the gun slips from between his lips and drops with his hand into his lap, barrel shining with spit to match the cooling semen shining on his fingers. He sits there and he looks down at himself, and the room is empty and silent.

If she could see.

If she could fucking _see this_ , if she could see the wretched truth of him, she wouldn't run screaming. Her face would screw up in a revolted grimace as she recoiled, and her hand might fly to her mouth to muffle an appalled laugh. She wouldn't fear him. She would detest him. He would reach for her and she would slap him ruthlessly away, kick him into the dirt, and then she wouldn't bother to muffle her scornful laughter at the very idea that she would _ever_ want to touch him now. That she would _ever_ abide him touching her. That she would want to get him all over her hands, have to wash him off herself.

She never loved him anyway. Maybe at one point she thought she did. But it wasn't love. It never could have been. At _best_ it was pity.

Pity, which it turns out he isn't worth. She might as well pity a possum in the final stages of rabies, dragging its dying body through the world, screeching and snapping uselessly at everyone with shit caking its hindquarters and dry foam crusted around its mouth. You don't pity something like that. You do one of two things: you leave it to die, or you give it some assistance with the process.

Apparently, if things were to go that way, he would need the latter.

He watches the moon slide across the floor. The dark, empty silence persists.

The moon is almost gone and the come on his hand is congealing and drying to a scale by the time he finally moves. He isn't thinking about it very much. It doesn't require a lot of thought. He stuffs his dick back into his fly and zips up, wipes his hand off on his shirt. Picks up the gun and examines it in the last of the milky light. Drops the magazine into his palm.

Nothing in the chamber. But it's loaded. It is. He didn't imagine that part.

He slaps the magazine back in.

He's not taking it back. It's nearly dawn and he shouldn't risk it, but he's also not taking it back because he doesn't fucking _want to._ He wants to keep it. Doesn't know exactly why anymore, because using it to _make it stop_ appears to be beyond his present capabilities, but something eyeless and skinless and grinning in the inky shadows of his mind is whispering that he should have it. There are all kinds of other reasons.

Even if he doesn't know what they are yet.

He crawls to his nest with it in his hand and as he curls up under the blankets he's holding against his chest like a treasure. He can't keep it in here. It's almost safe, probably, because for the most part people don't seem interested in doing any poking around on the rare occasions when they're in here at all, but it's not safe enough for his own comfort.

 _Comfort._ That's hilarious.

He can't keep it in here. Has to put it somewhere else. But he's too tired to think about another solution. Sleep now. At least a couple of hours. Then he can figure out what the hell he's going to do.

She wouldn't fear him, if she could see the truth of him. She wouldn't pity him. She would detest him.

But she _can't_ see the truth, now, can she?

She can't see a lot of things. Even when they're so close. Even when they're right in front of her. Even when they're beside her. Behind her. Even when they're on top of her. And he can't make her see.

So he can't save her. Not that he gets to save anyone anymore.

Not that anyone is worth saving.

No good. No bad. No devils or angels, sinners or saints. Just weak people. Sick people. Dead people. And the people who can't die.

No matter how much they want to.


	35. I'm down to just one thing

No real notes this time. Except to say that yet again, this is something I'm feeling very melancholy about finishing. Though yeah, I think it can't continue that much longer anyway.

As usual, thanks for being here. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 35: I'm down to just one thing**

 _I know you want me to say it, Henry, it's in the script, you want me to say_ Lie down on the bed, you're all I ever wanted and worth dying for too _but I think I'd rather keep the bullet this time. It's mine, you can't have it, see, I'm not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that's as good as anything._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She's never known what to do with her days off.

In truth, she doesn't have _days off._ Doesn't allow herself. She never really had them at the prison, either. Not even really at the farm. Sure, she had long lazy summers out of school and there was always Spring Break and a couple of times a trip to Florida - once to Disneyland when she was ten - and there was the winter holidays. Thanksgiving. But a farm never stops running. A farm doesn't take breaks. One way or another, she was always working. It felt good, to always be doing things. Maybe it put her in the minority of kids in her situation, but she always got the sense that Shawn and Maggie enjoyed it too. You sneak away to go to the swimming hole, parties, silly pointless aimless drives around the county with the windows down and music blaring, but in the end you always come home and you work, and the farm keeps running and living and the world keeps turning.

At the prison there was always something that needed doing. She found things. Took care of the littlest kids. Helped keep watch. Helped with food storage and inventory and prep. Worked the small fields, hoeing and weeding. She read, sometimes novels but often schoolbooks and other things that could count as _educational._ Organized a study group for the older kids, though it didn't really take. Did target practice. Wrote.

Thought about a lot of things. Thought all the time. Lying in bed in the dark, unable to stop thinking, her thoughts whirling around and around. She doesn't remember clearly what she was thinking _about._ Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. Just thinking. Getting herself off now and then when she felt the pressure building inside her but even that was slightly distracted. Unfocused despite the rapid motions of her fingers. She wasn't fully present in her own body.

Not thinking about Zach very much when she did that, truth be told. Thinking about some of the older guys. Bigger, stronger, more confident. One or two men she didn't know as well, but they had nice faces, nice hands. Were kind. She imagined they were good, probably. Might be rough but not too rough. Might be sweet with her. Slow.

Rick, more than once. Never told anyone about that. Never will.

And _him_.

Kid fantasies. Teenage girl, cliche - even at the end of the world. She thinks about them now and they're stupid, and she would rather not think about them at all.

So she doesn't know what people mean when they say _day off._ Maybe they don't mean anything. It's possible that they go through the exact same shit she does. Survival these days is a full time job.

But here, she has scheduled _days off,_ and she has no idea what to do with them.

She reads. She cleans the house. She cleans her rifle. Sometimes she goes to the armory and she cleans all the rifles, sitting on the floor with a small dropcloth under her, oil on her hands as they move in those smooth, repetitive motions that she doesn't have to pay much attention to. And thinking.

None of it satisfies.

More and more, she catches herself staring into space. Losing time as she does it. She might do it for half an hour at a stretch. Maybe longer.

Sitting under a tree near the gardens and doing that now, alternately watching two kids on weeding duty and the light dancing through the shifting leaves above her. Drifting. There's a rustle in the grass at her side and Denise is lowering herself to sit. Not asking, but she must know that if Beth doesn't want her there, Beth will say as much.

Beth doesn't say as much. She meets Denise's gaze and gives her a single nod.

Silence for a while.

Then: "How're you doing?"

Beth sighs. "Alright." And it's not exactly a lie but it's not the whole truth either, and Denise will know that. Denise is perceptive, though not in the knife-edge way Daryl is. It's softer. But it's every bit as unyielding. "It's not really gettin' any easier. With him."

Denise nods, and when Beth glances at her there's no surprise in her expression. She expected this answer. Probably she already knew, because it's predictable. And she knows Daryl by now. "What about _you,_ though?"

"I don't…" She trails off, her gaze back on the leaves above her, the bark rough against the crown of her head as it tilts upward. _Her._ It comes to her all at once that she hasn't truly thought of herself in isolation from _him_ since he got here. She's irrevocably entangled with him, with his boundless darkness and the tiny flickering light struggling to keep shining at its heart. She's inside it with him. She was the second he fixed her with that burning, insane stare. He pulled her in and she doesn't honestly think he's capable of letting her go.

And it's not even that he doesn't want to.

"I'm fine."

"I think _fine_ might be overstating it."

Shrug. She can't find it in herself to be irritated. "I'm good enough."

"You were having a rough time when you first got here," Denise says quietly. "I mean, you all were, but I think it was worse for you. I never got why. I think I do now."

"We were out there for a long time. We did the worst things." She swallows. This is evasion, but again, it's not untrue. "We did the worst kinds of things just to survive."

"But I said, it was worse for you. You and Rick. Bad in the same way, I thought at the time. I wasn't going to say anything, because…" She laughs thinly. "I thought you might stab me or something, you know? You guys were fucking _scary._ But I watched you. Everyone else adjusted pretty well. Glenn, Maggie, Abe, Rosita and Eugene and Noah, Father Gabriel… And Tara." Her voice softens even more. "Carol and Carl, not so much. They didn't _settle._ Still haven't. Or Michonne. And I think Sasha had a rough time at first, too. But you and Rick, it's different."

She pauses. Beth says nothing. She's waiting. The names came like blows and she bore them, because she knows they're not meant to be. She knows where this is going and it's not a place she wants to spend any time in, but with the same suddenness as her previous revelation, she knows it's inevitable.

All the dead are rising now, and she has to look each one of them in the face.

"What happened? With the three of you. When he got shot."

Beth looks down, cocks her head. Without meaning to she's begun worrying at the cuff wrapping her left wrist, fingering the worn edge of the leather. She's not sure there's a word for what her gut is doing. "He didn't tell you?"

"He didn't tell me any details. I don't think he can. He was fighting so hard to tell me what he _did_ tell me. And like… His memory breaks off pretty hard. Of course." Another pause. Denise's features are fixed in an expression that can't properly be called nervous, though it's not all that far distant. But Beth doubts the nervousness is for herself.

She knows this could hurt. A lot.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't-"

"It was my fault."

She releases a huge breath, closes her eyes. People have told her it's not. They've told her more than once, or implied it if they haven't said it explicitly. They've been saying it for months. _Daryl_ said it. But when it comes down to it, when she looks this decaying corpse in the face and wipes off its funeral makeup, she knows better. "I attacked someone. It was stupid. I was stupid. She had a _gun_ , it was pointed straight at me. I would've gotten myself killed. Probably a lot of other people." Her teeth sink into her lip and gnaw. "He pushed me outta the way. Right at the wrong second. Gun went off, he took the bullet."

Nothing. Then, a breath from Denise: "Jesus."

"Thing is, she didn't even mean to. The woman I was goin' after. I don't think so. I got her in the shoulder with a pair of scissors, probably she just squeezed the trigger by accident. She was sayin' she didn't mean to, anyway, before Rick killed her."

She loosens her hands and they fall limp in the grass by her sides. She's not crying, which is strange. She would have thought the eyes of this body would make her cry. Force her tears out of her. Ruthless.

"I'd never seen him like that. He was shakin' so hard. He was…" The light, moving and moving. Stroking its bright fingertips across her face. "I don't even know how to say what he was."

"What happened then?"

"No one else died. We carried him out. Then a herd came. We had to run, and we… We couldn't just leave him there for them. He was…" Her mouth wrenches sideways so hard it hurts her, and she tastes a surge of bile. The memory of her vomit has somehow remained one of the most intense parts of the whole thing. "We didn't know he was alive but we thought he was _fresh_ enough, they would've eaten him. We couldn't just _let that happen._ Y'know?"

Murmur: "Yeah. I know."

"There was a car. We put him in the trunk. We ran. I don't know if maybe we meant to go back for him. I don't think we did." She exhales again. It's smaller. She has less air to release. "I don't remember most of what happened right after that."

She stops. Over in the vegetable garden, the girls are laughing at something. Light laughter, careless. Some joke about something entirely mundane. She can't even imagine what it might be. She doesn't know when she last laughed that way.

"I had his blood all over me," she whispers. "It was in my mouth. I didn't wash it off for a while." She glances down at her waist, her belt. What she hasn't stopped carrying there. "I had his knife. I don't remember how I got it. But I had it. I kept it."

She doesn't know what she's expecting now. For Denise to do what they always do, perhaps - tell her that _it's not her fault,_ that there's nothing she could have done. That she didn't make him push her out of the way. That she didn't fire the gun. That they didn't know he was still alive. That it's actually better that they left him behind, because he almost certainly would have died if they tried to take him with them - a fact with which she's well acquainted.

But Denise says none of that. And after a few wordless minutes, Beth realizes that she isn't going to.

Instead she drops her hand into the grass, covers Beth's with it. It's warm and soft, and Beth can't keep back her shudder as the knot that's settled into her chest binds itself around her lungs.

What she wants right now is a total damn mystery to her.

"You're not fine." Denise gives her fingers a quick little squeeze. "That's okay. No one gets to be fine anymore."

"I didn't know why I was alive." She turns her head, gives Denise a smile. Very small, anemic. Painful. "I still don't."

"Maybe you don't need a reason."

Nod. She can allow how that's so. She told Rick that Daryl had no reason either. It could be that no one does. It could be that Daddy was full up with shit about that, and nothing happens for any reason at all. It merely _happens,_ and you live with it or you don't.

She thinks it's likely.

Another thing she expects is for Denise to lift her hand away, clear her throat, and for things to be awkward. But she doesn't do that either, and it isn't, and Beth closes her eyes and after another moment or two the knot in her chest unwinds and she can breathe again.

"Are you coming to the party?"

Beth opens her eyes. Blinks. "Party?"

"Tomorrow afternoon. They just decided yesterday. It's been almost a month since the attack, Deanna thinks people could use something like that. Blow off some steam." Denise shrugs. "I don't think she's wrong. There's going to be a barbecue. Music. Mark got hold of some balloons that actually don't seem like they'll burst the second you blow into them."

Beth laughs. She can't help it. It might be the most absurd thing she's ever heard of. " _Balloons?_ "

"Yeah. You know how people are." Denise's crooked smile suggests that she's well aware of the absurdity. That one must be indulgent about such things. "I know it's ridiculous, but you should come. You should all come. Even if you don't stay that long."

 _All._ And a very large elephant stomps into a very small room.

"Daryl?"

"That's up to you. And him." She shoves herself to her feet, dusting off her jeans and grunting softly as she stretches. "Think about it. Okay?"

Beth nods. She supposes there's really nothing else to do.

She watches Denise start to walk away over the grass, heading back toward the clinic, and she's about to return her attention to the leaves and the light when Denise turns and looks back, an indefinable expression on her face and in her eyes.

"Beth?"

Beth simply looks at her.

"You're a good person."

Before Beth can even begin to construct a response, she's gone.

* * *

Again: Denise.

Not Aaron's. Not the living room. Out back, which has become something of a safe haven between his room - which stopped being safe a long time ago if it ever was - and just about everywhere else - which is alternately terrifying and loathsome. Except the garage, of course. But there are reasons why he doesn't want to talk there. Why he doesn't want her there.

Why he would prefer no one be there.

Mid-afternoon, out back, her coming out to meet him with a cup of horrible coffee in her hands and him with a cigarette sitting crosslegged in the grass. His smoke and her steam. He follows the course of both with his eyes. His gaze is unfocused and floating and as such can nearly anticipate the slow curling ascent of the vaporous twins.

He didn't dream last night. Or really, this morning. Not that he remembers.

It comes to the same.

She sits down on the next-to-bottom step and looks at him. Lights hits her glasses and reflects; he can't see her eyes. He doesn't like that. Shifts, tilts his head to try, but it doesn't work. He doesn't want to move more than he has. He looks away, fingers tearing at the grass - good, because if they're tearing at the grass they aren't tearing at each other. At him. Someone would think it was good, anyway. Maybe the same kind of person who would look at him and think he was _trying._ How nice for them. How flattering. He's pretty sure he's still doing well as far as pretending goes. Maybe better than well. He'd like to thank the Academy. He has so _many_ people to thank. Should have made a list.

Stares down at the cigarette in his hand and wonders if it would hurt, adding another layer of scar tissue to the little circle he already has on his left hand. If he would feel anything at all.

She's asked him how he's doing. He didn't notice. This is the second time she's asking him; can tell by the volume and pitch of her voice, and she uses his name and sounds pointed with it. Patiently demanding his attention. _Daryl_. Looks up, squints. He's in the shade but it's a sunny day and the light is less than ideal. How is he doing?

Actively suicidal. Apparently. Just can't seem to commit. No better at it than _she_ was.

Shrug.

He's doing okay. Guesses.

How's the bike?

Snaps his gaze back up to her. Jaw clenched. Teeth bare. Yeah, bitch knows that's a sore spot. Went right for it. He's getting a decent sense of how she operates. She lulls him, opens him up, makes him think he could be safe, but it's just to establish the location of all his weak points, and now that she has them she'll hit every one of them purely to amuse herself.

That's why she's asking, right? Why the hell else would she be asking?

Did she see something?

Flat. Not bothering to sound dangerous. No point. He's not going to kill her here, like this and they both know it. Not even going to go at her. Not going to carve himself across those few feet like a knife and rip her open, make the steps into a very messy and very unhygienic operating theater. The bike is the same unless Aaron did something to it. He hasn't been back there. Doesn't give a shit.

Sounds convincing.

Left it lying there on its side. Left her there with it. That time. Since then he's thought about it, about Aaron coming in and seeing it, glitter of broken headlamp glass scattered across the concrete, handlebars poking out from under the edge of the tarp like the hands of a murder victim covered by a sheet at a crime scene. He's imagined Aaron wondering what happened. He's thought about Aaron and about what Aaron might look like when he's sad, when he's disappointed, and he wanted to shatter his own fucking nose.

It doesn't matter.

Is he going to go back and work on it some more?

Fucking hell, she makes him so tired with these _questions,_ and he was tired already. Tired, sullen throb in the back of his head that might mean impending disaster or might mean the usual general hellishness. Why does she give a shit? Why did she give a shit to begin with? _Don't fuckin' say you_ like me, _that's bullshit._ What does she _want_ from him?

She said. She wants to help him. Quiet. That's what she wants. That's what she's always wanted. That's why she did what she did and why she does what she does. She wants to help people.

Snort. So it's not personal after all, then. He's her fun little _project,_ her fucking fixer-upper, with the _therapy_ and the _medication._ At least she's finally being honest with him.

She sighs. If he wants to think of himself that way, she can't stop him.

What the fuck, dumb cow, _she_ thinks of him that way, she _just fucking said so._

How does he want her to think of him?

Silence. He stares at her, distressingly nonplussed. He's thrown, bitch _threw_ him, and he's had enough of her doing that. Holding his balance is already just about impossible and she keeps knocking him off it. Kicking his legs out from under him with these carefully calculated jabs. It's unfair.

Not that _fair_ is a thing, but it still is.

He lowers his gaze to his green-stained fingers and rubs their tips together. Smooth circles, over and over and over. Flecks and strings of green flesh, damp like drying blood.

He doesn't want her to think about him at all.

Is that true?

Is it true.

The grass whispers as the breeze combs over it, and in the field of his weary vision it turns a bloodless gray. Everything is gray. Everything is blurry, all at once glimpsed through a low fog. The sky is lost to him. The houses, he walls. Even she is growing indistinct. He's slipping away from her. The steps. The house.

He's slipping away from everything.

He doesn't want anyone to think about him. Everyone thinks about him all the fucking time and he's so sick of it. Everyone talks about him, about how to _manage_ him. Maybe they don't do it in front of him, maybe they don't even do it aloud a lot of the time, but they're navigating him. His presence. His state of mind. Where he is, what he wants, doesn't want, what's likely to set him off. How to keep him from screaming at them. How to keep him from attacking them. Attacking himself. How to keep him calm. How to keep him from bleeding all over everything. Keep the damage to his hands and face under control. Keep him fed. Make sure the clothes he wears are at least kind of clean. Make sure he bathes semi-regularly. Brushes his damn teeth. They're about two steps from worrying about how well he wipes his fucking _ass,_ and for all he knows they _do_ worry about that.

No part of him is off limits from their earnestly concerned scrutiny. They won't leave him alone.

 _Do you want to be alone, Daryl?_

And then something happens.

It's happened more than once, though not a lot. Almost exclusively with _her_. It disturbs him deeply when it comes over him, as powerful as his fits of hysterical rage, his _seizures_. His storms. It isn't like those; this is easy and swift and bizarrely gentle in how it overwhelms him, and the best way he could ever hope to describe it is that it's as if he's being _filled._ Something is flowing into him from somewhere else, into all his cracks and broken places. Covering his jagged coastline with softly lapping water.

Or it's welling up inside him, like a spring. Somewhere very far down, something he forgot about. Something he needed to forget. _Wants_ to forget. Shit, it doesn't belong here. It doesn't belong _in him._ Wanting to claw at his face, beat at his own head - _go the fuck AWAY._

Not like Merle. Merle chowing down on his turkey leg of a human arm, hideously amiable smile and teeth streaked with gore. No, it's not like that, the horror he feels.

He can't stop it. Can't stop anything. It happens and the air leaves him in a single rush, and he's made empty to pull it back in all fresh and new. His lungs open to receive it. The worms in his heart are still.

Once he would have done anything to not be alone.

 _Once._ Her softness remains. Intensifies. Somehow she's closer, even if she hasn't moved. _When?_

Shrug. Long time ago. Before all this. Before he came here, before he died. All that time before, it meant everything to him that he wasn't alone. He had _them._ The world ended and he lost Merle, but he still had them. All of them. They didn't make him leave. They wanted him there, with them. He had a place. _Earned_ a place. He worked hard to keep it. He was proud of it and of himself, maybe for the first time in his life he was genuinely proud of himself, and he wasn't alone and he wasn't afraid of being alone anymore.

Even when he lost it all, he still had _her._ So he wasn't alone. She wouldn't _let_ him be alone. She didn't leave him, even when she probably should have. She stayed with him. He was with her. They were together and it was good. It could have been.

Something pulling at his mouth; it hurts like a strained muscle. At some point he realizes that it's a smile.

Lost her. After that he went with a bunch of murdering pricks, worse than murder, real _psychos,_ but he didn't know what they could actually do until it was almost too late, and at least before that he wasn't alone. Then Rick killed them - or not all by himself but he did a lot of the killing - and he was back with _them_. And Rick said _you're my brother_ and it pierced him, sharp and sweet, and he knew he wouldn't be alone anymore.

And he was certain that would find her and be with her and she would be safe, she would stay with him, and it would be like it was supposed to be. He had faith.

Instead he died. Then they left him behind. Then he woke up in a place that frightened him so badly and he was in so much pain all the time, so confused, so angry and he didn't know why and he hurt people because he couldn't make it stop, and after he left _there_ and _them_ he was alone again, and he's been alone ever since. For months he's been alone. Walked through the dark for hundreds of miles, alone. His ghosts and his demons were never real; he's perfectly aware of that. He invented them because without them the night was too vast and too unbearably empty, and he was all alone inside it. He killed the bad people he found, made himself alone again, and from his victims he created more demons to fill his loneliness.

He desperately believed that once he found _her,_ it would be all right. It would be better. He would be better. He wouldn't be alone. All that agony and all that terror would no longer matter, because it would be like it was, like it was _supposed to be,_ and he would never be alone again.

He believed. He had faith. Then he got here. Got to _her._ Found her.

Nothing was better. He's still alone.

Does she see? Does she see how completely hopeless this is? Raising his head to look at her, so _full_ of this wretched thing, this shade, this man who died six hundred miles away and rotted to nothing in the trunk of a car. Never made it. Shouldn't be here. Yet here he is, taken over, and he won't stop fucking _talking._ Beaming through his eyes and respirating through his pores like the smoke from his forgotten and dying cigarette. He never wanted to be alone. Now he can't stop being alone. He no longer knows how to _not_ be alone.

It doesn't matter what he wants. What matters is what _is_. If anything does. And he _is_ alone. They think about him and talk about him and at him, and they press in close around him and hover and pester and coddle and pet and they try to _help him_ , but they can't reach him. No one can.

He doesn't get to come back. He was out there too long. He doesn't belong here and he never will. He doesn't belong anywhere.

Except in the trunk of that fucking car.

She's simply looking at him. He still can't see her eyes. He doesn't know how much of it he actually said. He doesn't remember. It's possible that he said nothing at all. It's possible that he's been sitting here for five, maybe ten minutes and gazing at her in total silence while words spin in the mud of his brain and spatter it all over the walls of his skull.

She shakes her head. He's wrong. It does matter what he wants. _It does._

No. Patient with her. She's not a dumb cow. She's not a bitch. She's a well-intentioned woman who wants to help him, but she doesn't understand. It doesn't matter. It never has.

 _Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come._

 _You're gonna die. Everyone in this place is gonna die. This place? It's gonna burn. Nothin' can stop that. Nothin' can change it. No one can save you. You don't belong here. You don't get to live. It's not your fault. It's just how it is. It's just how it's supposed to be. It never coulda gone any other way._

 _Everyone is gonna die. And I'll die alone. And no one will be left to remember I was ever here at all._

Her coffee is cold on the step beside her, her glasses are off and trembling in her hand. She's looking at him and she's crying, tears streaming down her face, and he feels a distant, dreamy kind of envy as he watches them fall. A vague desire for something he'll never have - so the desire is ultimately pointless. Just like everything else.

 _I'm sorry. Please go away._

 _Please leave me alone._

* * *

She's not asleep when the tap at her window comes.

She couldn't say why, but she's not surprised. She didn't see him, earlier. Rick told her he said he didn't want to see anyone. She respected that; she has to. Left, came home, ate and did nothing much until she felt she could justify going to bed. Empty house. Empty room even with her in it. She can't sleep, staring up at the shadows churning slowly across the ceiling, and now as she sits up and rises to her feet, she understands that she was waiting for him.

His mind remains largely unknown territory, its inhabitants adherents to rules and laws and customs she's unable to comprehend. Yet at the same time she does know him. His patterns and habits might not be familiar, but the shapes they take and the logic according to which they operate are still his. The skeleton of his structure. The frame. His morphology. He isn't a completely different animal.

There are things she can nearly predict.

It might be part of why she can't make herself give up on him.

She doesn't bother going to the window. She doesn't bother throwing something on over her shorts and camisole. She's moving calmly and easily as she heads down the hall to the front door and lays her palm over the cool handle. But she hesitates.

Only a few seconds. But something catches her, unseen and unfelt hands on her shoulders, holding her back. The last three times she's seen him, the last three days, he's been good. He's been sweet. He's been _himself._ Sad and hurting and struggling so hard it's clearly been making the pain much worse, but he's been there and he's been trying, whatever he may think about himself. A long stretch. Enough to make her hope.

Hope dangerously much. Because this can't last. She's playing the odds. He's strong but his strength can only extend so far. Sooner or later the darkness will drag him back down.

He loves her. He loves her with everything in him, and she believes it with everything in her. But the fact remains: inside the man she loves a wolf is prowling, a wolf who hates her and _wants_ her and wants to destroy and devour her, and that man and that wolf are standing together outside her door.

 _Let me come in._

Which one of them will she see when she opens it?

There's only one way to know.

She opens the door, and she lets him in.


	36. a still life is the last I will see

**Note:** Like I said on Tumblr earlier, this is the last chapter I'll post until the rest of the thing is written. I don't know for sure how many more chapters we're talking about there, but I don't anticipate them taking more than another week or so to complete. I'm also not yet sure how I'll parcel them out, but as I said before, I'll try to minimize the cruelty.

While, y'know. Being cruel. Because I'm me.

Anyway, I'm happy to be able to post this. This is a chapter I've been wanting to get to for a long time. "Death Dream" by Frightened Rabbit is my mental soundtrack for the middle scene here (also the source for the chapter title), and ended up guiding a huge amount of how it was written. Blame grenye/stubbornmarrow for that. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 36: a still life is the last I will see of you**

 _You said_ Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light _and I said_ This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube... _We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said_ What do you want, sweetheart? _and you said_ Kiss me. _Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She doesn't need to see him in the light to know that getting to her took almost everything he has.

She opens the door and for half a second she thinks he's actually going to fall on her, swaying with one hand on the doorframe and the other hanging loosely at his side, his shoulders slumped, head down. He raises it as she steps forward, reaching for him, and the look on his face, in his hollow eyes - she knows it. She's seen it. The evening she went into his room and he was limp under the blankets, and moving even so much as his _hand_ was nearly beyond his power. That hand lying softly curled on the floor - and that was something she had seen before as well.

And he told her he hated her. And he loved her. And begged her not to leave him alone.

Same look now. Same affect. Same everything. His eyes are blankly exhausted, and at first glance they look empty, but as she curls an arm around his waist and he leans on her and shuffles across the threshold, she catches the glint in them. The light.

He's still fighting. He realized what was happening to him and he got out - of that house, of that _room_. He crossed the street to get to her, and those yards must have felt like the crossing of an ocean. A journey that almost broke him. He was determined. Single-minded. He dragged himself onward with everything he had left and he washed ashore on the other coast.

He made it.

"C'mon." She slides her shoulder under his arm and bears him up, pressed against his side, the bars of his ribcage still so terribly near his skin. He walks another few feet and she reaches back to swing the door shut behind them, and then they're cloaked by the shadows.

She never bothered to turn a light on, either.

But she can make out his face, even so. Lowered to her - the outlines of his features. They look more defined than usual. Craggy and worn. As he did when he came to her that first night, he looks old.

She lifts her hands and sweeps his hair back. It's pointless, it immediately falls back into place over his eyes, but in that brief interim she sees him again, how unbelievably fucking _tired_ he is, and her throat clenches in on itself, blocking her when she tries to swallow and knotting beneath her collarbones.

This isn't like when she came to his room. This is worse. She has no idea how he's even standing.

 _God,_ he's so fucking strong.

She presses her thumbs against his cracked lips and traces them to the corners of his mouth, and he whimpers softly, his eyes falling closed as he covers her wrists with shaking hands. She can't give up on him. She _can't._ Even if she wanted to, he comes to her like this and she knows she can't.

"What do you need?"

He shakes his head and she expects that. His mind is as exhausted as the rest of him. He probably has no idea what he needs, no idea how to help himself or what to ask for - except for it to stop. He almost certainly doesn't know how to _make_ it do that, and almost certainly doesn't _care_ how, so long as his current existence no longer consists of this.

This walking death.

Then he whispers _You_ , and she sighs and tips her forehead against his chest, feeling the plodding thud of his heart against her brow.

"I don't wanna be alone." Still nothing more than that ragged whisper. He's throwing the words in front of an exhalation, the only way they'll ever make it out of him. His vocal cords are useless, numb bands of tissue in his throat, and she aches to hear what he's managing in their place. "They're gone. They went away. Can't see 'em anymore."

She lifts her head and looks up at him, palms over the ridges of his cheekbones. He's standing so close to her, hasn't completely stopped leaning on her, but all at once she's alarmed by how little warmth he's radiating. His skin is cool. Not clammy like a man in the grip of a fever but instead very dry. She takes a breath, searching his face.

"Who's gone?"

But she already knows.

"The _things._ " He's never had a name for them, not that he's ever used with her. "They never left before. Not like this." He shivers, sudden and violent, and once more she thinks he might fall, and if he does she doesn't have the first clue what she'll do. "I'm scared. Beth, I'm-"

He breaks off into deep silence, and she doesn't know how to fill it. He's never told her that. Never actually _said_ it, not like _that,_ even when she knew he was terrified. Panicked. Saying it now, his head in her hands, it's once again like it was before and the age melts away from him and he's a boy alone and hurting in the dark, lost in a nightmare he can't wake up from and with no one to guide him out.

She's not seeing an illusion, and it's not her imagination. This is yet another echo of yet another person he's been. Yet another person it's too late to save, and the knowledge is a needle at the base of her skull.

"You're not alone." She tugs his head down, so gentle, and kisses his brow. Kisses the scar and the place where he keeps picking it open, the roughness of the scab against her lips. "You're with me. I'm here."

This shouldn't feel sacramental. But she can't escape the uneasy conviction that every move she makes here might be the most important thing she'll ever do. She can't save this version of him, either. She's still sure of that. But she _is_ here with him, perhaps the last of his demons, and that confers responsibilities upon her. There _are_ things she can give him, whether or not he knows to ask for them.

She glances further down the hall, the dark rise of the staircase and the wide entrance to the kitchen, the living room, the smaller hallway that leads back to her bedroom. The house always looks bigger at night, and parts of it always feel less welcoming. Less safe. Whatever else happens now, it shouldn't happen here. The muscles of his legs are quivering. It won't be much longer before they give out and he _does_ fall, and she already knows she won't be able to get him up again. And he's going to fall either way.

He should fall into something that can receive him.

"C'mon," she repeats, and maneuvers her shoulder back under his arm, pulls him forward. "C'mon and lie down with me."

* * *

He sinks down onto her bed without being prompted. The second she releases him and steps back he's going down in a controlled slide, the mattress bouncing slightly under his weight - very slight, under weight that remains slight as well. Too much so.

She didn't bother with the light in here, either, and she doesn't now. The moon is rising and spilling in through the window, pouring through the panes and seeping in where she has the sash half raised. As it always does, it drains the color from everything and makes it all look pristine, pure, and dark with an corresponding purity that equally comforts and unsettles her. Her hands and her bare legs when she glances down, the total absence of illumination in the corners. The sharp lines and extreme curves, nothing quite the size it should be. The effect is most extreme when it touches him; the window is at his back where he sits and yet again he's silhouetted - haloed in silver, his face a single fall of shadow.

He sits like he stood: hunched, slumped, seemingly on the verge of toppling, and she braces one knee on the bed beside him as she helps him turn himself and lie back. No boots, of course. No boots and old clothes hanging too loose on his frame. They make him look smaller than he is. She doesn't like it. Hasn't since she first saw it, which was his fourth or fifth day. It hasn't improved with time or its familiarity.

He rolls onto his side and faces her, back still to the window and his knees drawing up, arms tucked in close. Only the flicker of his eyes as he blinks marks their location with any reliability, and she hesitates, leaning over him, combing her fingers through his hair. He stares up at her, wordless.

 _What do you need?_

 _You._

She climbs the rest of the way onto the bed and lowers herself to lie beside him.

She's not touching him anymore. He's not touching her. They're lying face to face, both half-fetal, the rise and fall of his shoulders almost imperceptible as he breathes. She follows it, tracks it with a kind of dull desperation that laces itself into her muscles, but suddenly it's as if he's receding and drifting away from her again. Smaller and smaller into the covers - but his eyes remain, black and enormous, fixed on her and fixing her in place.

She fights back a shudder. He shouldn't see it. He might misinterpret.

He might interpret perfectly.

She extends a hand. Not sure what for; to catch him, maybe. Secure him before he floats any further back out into that ocean he just crossed. Establish his true distance, prove to herself that he can _be_ touched. That he's _here._ Her fingers trail down the ragged line of his jaw and it shifts as he pulls in a hard breath and somehow finds the will to send more words out with it.

"I dunno how much longer I can do this."

The pad of her thumb finds his lower lip again, presses. Traces. His mouth is trembling as if he's on the verge of tears, though she knows he's not. "Do what?"

She knows that too.

"Try." He's quiet for a moment, eyes closed, motionless beneath her hand. "I know what you said. I know what you _see._ But that's not all you see."

He's pushed her before, herded her - sometimes clumsily and sometimes not - in the direction of honesty. But even if he's technically been blunt, it's never felt like this. Not this kind of weary gentleness. No anger. No frustration or impatience. He's merely lying in her bed and making it abundantly plain that he's not going to accept anything less than the truth.

That if he's owed anything, it's that.

"I'm _bad._ There's somethin' _bad_ in me." He's curling in tighter on himself and she has to chase him with her fingers, cupping his cheek as she leans her upper body closer to his. That, too, he's said as much. But this is a new thing. He angles his head up enough to meet her eyes, his own unfocused and faintly jittery. It's like the last remnants of his panic are seated there. Or the battle he's fighting simply to stay lucid. "I came back wrong. Beth… I never shoulda been here at all."

"That's not true."

"And that's bullshit." Something she might be willing to call a smile. An awful one, twisted and sad. "No matter how much I try, ain't gonna make no difference. No matter how good I do, ain't gonna last. It's gonna be fucked in the end. I'm gonna hurt someone." At last he lifts his hand and reaches for her, and her eyes flutter briefly closed and she can't hide her shudder this time as he ghosts his chewed fingertips from her temple down her cheek to her jaw. They were healing, and they don't look nearly as bad as they did, but he's still going at them. Fresh blood is crusted around his nail beds. Patches of his cuticles are raw and red.

Christ, she would give anything for him to keep touching her like this. No poisonous, hungry desire, not that she can sense. No mutilated hatred. No vicious rage. And every movement is slow, clearly requiring enormous effort, but he can _move._ He's emerging from the gray, even if only a little.

He's touching her like he would have, if she hadn't been taken from him and he hadn't stopped. If he had continued his tentative, innocent explorations of her body and the ways in which his could come into contact with it. If they had made it past _Oh_.

He's touching her like he loves her.

"I'm gonna hurt you."

"You're not." _You stupid fucking Pollyanna bitch, you forget who you're in bed with?_

"I don't want to. _Fuck,_ you know I don't want to. But I will." Somehow without her noticing he shifted nearer, and now his lips are nearly brushing her brow. She can feel their movements stirring the air just above her skin, and his breath doing the same - and it's still not very warm. That alarming lack of heat persists. "I'm not gonna get better. I'm not gonna _belong._ Best I'm doin' right now is pretendin'. And I'm so tired." A breath heaves out of him. "I'm so fuckin' _tired._ "

On his knees in front of her, gazing up at her. Pleading. _No._ No, he is not asking her for that. That's not what this is. She won't _let_ it be. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and tugs him across the tiny remaining distance, meets him there, buries her face in his hair.

"You just gotta keep holdin' on."

He sighs and it ripples through him like a disturbance on the surface of dark water. "How much longer? When do I get to be done?" He shrugs her away enough to tip his head back and catch her eyes with his own, and they're _shining_ with how profoundly _himself_ he is, and she can't breathe at all. "When does it _stop?_ "

When the words come to her, they escape on her own bloodless whisper. Echo of his. "Don't. Daryl… I _love_ you, please… Please don't do this."

"Do what?"

 _You know._ Her fingers clench in the thin fabric of his shirt, digging into the hard muscle it covers. As if she can keep him here by virtue of pure physical exertion. "Don't give up like this. I told you, I can't…" She practically lunges forward, burrowing into him, pressed chest to hip with one leg hooked over the back of his knee. Finally she can feel his heat, though it's faint, rising to her from a core trapped deep inside him, and it's _something_. "I can't lose you again, I can't _do that._ "

"What if I can't do _this?_ "

" _You can._ "

She's fighting him. She doesn't know exactly when it happened, where the line was and when she crossed it, but she's a step away from shaking him, punching him, butting her forehead against his breastbone, her voice tense and fierce and strangled. She's fighting but he's not; he's circling his arms around her, cheek against the crown of her head, and absurdity upon absurdity: all at once _he's_ the one comforting _her._ Frightened sobs are crawling their way up from her diaphragm and he's holding her so tight, a blur of silver and shadows in her broken field of vision, and the hideous and still half unbelievable thought comes to her that he might be asking for her permission.

Her permission to go. If not actually asking for her help.

 _I don't wanna be like this anymore._

 _I want it to stop._

There was a chance. Denise said. As long as he believed it was possible, he had a chance. Best chance he had. As long as he had faith.

Wouldn't have killed him to have a little of that.

"I love you, Beth." Whisper, a breath stretched into an agonized smile, and she pulls back enough to see that the smile is beautiful before she's falling into him again and sealing her mouth over his.

He gasps, stiffens, and for a few seconds he's frozen. She's frozen with him, gripping his shoulders, lips motionless against his own, and a tiny voice in the back of her mind - perhaps the one remaining sane part of her - is screaming _no, no, oh my god don't don't fucking do it._ Tiny but loud enough that she wonders if he can hear it.

He pulls back again. Wrenches free from her and stares at her, his candle-flicker eyes the only light in the dark angles of his face. Blinks. Licks his dry lips, sucks in a breath. For a surreal fraction of a second, she sees the war he's fighting inside himself. The war of attrition that he's been fighting for months. Maybe for a lot longer than that.

Maybe what he's been fighting his whole life.

What a sweet relief surrender might now seem to him. And what she might be able to give.

She's opening her mouth to say his name, and he swallows it as he grips her jaw and kisses her.

It's not like before. It's not like it was at first, gentle and soft and so hesitant, so apprehensive, and even later when he was more confident. It's not like the horror it was in bed in the clinic, when she felt just how much he _wanted_ her and just what that _wanting_ could make him do to her. It's like a perfect hybrid of both, ungraceful and desperate as he tongues her lips apart, and she moans and opens to him and licks into him as she tangles her fingers in his hair and drags him in.

Down.

Because he's lifting himself over her, running a shaking hand up her side and pulling up the hem of her camisole, ragged fingertips gliding across her bare skin, and heat flares and catches low in her belly and glows. She wasn't thinking before and she's even further from that now, even the screaming gone quiet, muffled by her panting and his deep groan as she spreads her legs and he settles between them, and she muffles a cry in the hollow of his neck when he rocks into her and she feels him big and hard against her pubic bone.

She can't do this. Not with how he is. Not with the wolf inside him, the invisible W on his brow, not with the skinless thing grinning its rusty razor blade smile as it strokes itself in anticipation of her. He's good now, yes. But something could break in him, he'll scent her blood, and he'll turn on her and sink his teeth into her carotid artery, thrust his serrated nails into her cunt and hook them into her walls and _tear_.

His mouth and hands streaked with her blood, painting it across her skin. Sucking it off her nipples. Licking it off her lips, before he _bites._

And she's only getting wetter.

He's breathing her name against her jaw, her throat, slipping downward toward her collarbones as his fingers creep under her camisole - and he's hesitant, uncertain, lifting his head and staring down at her, and she fumbles for his wrist and _drags_ his hand up to her tit. He jerks, forces a whine through his teeth, eyes squeezed shut. He's still terrified. Kneading her, circling her peaked nipple with his thumb and peaking it higher and making her gasp - it's clearly taking everything he has left in order to keep from running from this, but if anything now he's harder, bigger, and as she squirms a hand between them and cups her palm over his length he shudders and sobs her name, and joins it with affirmation.

 _Beth. Beth, fuck_ yeah, _ohshitplease._

She kneads him like he's kneading her, cups her other hand over the back of his head, clenches her thighs against his hips and thrusts her tongue into his mouth. Thrusts all of herself up into him. _Taking_ it.

The world fucking _owes_ them this.

Once she would have wanted this to be slow. In her first fantasies of him, those stupid cliche teenage girl fantasies, it _was_ slow. He was firm and rough with her, because he was a rough man and of course he would be, but he was also good to her, careful in his way, and he took her slowly. In her imagination, when she _lost her virginity_ to Daryl Dixon, she wasn't losing anything at all.

Those fantasies were bullshit but she still would have wanted slow. Sweet. Wanted time to _be_ with him, lie with him and touch him and encourage him to touch her, show him how she liked it best, ask him to show her the same. Time to _see_ him, every part of him, learn them and love them, display herself for him with a shy little smile, roll together in the sheets and stroke and kiss and lick and suck everywhere until they couldn't fucking _stand_ it anymore, and he entered her and she welcomed him in.

Wouldn't have to be perfect. Wouldn't have to be smooth, something out of a _damn romance novel._ He could and probably would be awkward. She could make mistakes. It might not all be comfortable. Might feel weird in parts, might even hurt a tiny bit here and there. But it could be good all the same, _they_ could be good, fucking the rest of the world away on a kitchen table or in a coffin or on the porch of a moonshine shack or under the trees and the shine of the moon, and nothing else would have to matter.

This is not perfect, and it's not smooth. It's not romantic. It's not gentle.

It's not slow.

She's frantic as she half shoves and half kicks him off her, yanking her camisole off and hissing a curse when a strap gets tangled in her hair. Her breasts are bare underneath it, and that first grab must have made him bold - or just even more desperate - because he's grabbing at her again with both hands, pinching at her nipples and sparking her nerves all the way up to her throat, making it difficult to shimmy her shorts down her hips, but she doesn't give a fuck. She kicks and arches, curses again, claws at his shirt until it's over his head and cast onto the floor, and then she's dragging him back down on top of her and kissing him so hard she hurts herself, kissing the breath out of him - because she needs to know it's _there._ He has breath to take.

His heart is thundering because it was beating in the first place.

 _Daryl. Jesus fucking Christ, DARYL._ She might be moaning. Might be yelling. Doesn't matter. The empty house is all theirs. The rest of the Zone might as well be dead for all she cares - dead and burning all around them, lighting the room gold and orange and crimson. She's so _wet_ and his hand is forcing its way between her legs and pressing her lips apart, and it's just like she imagined: raw finger pushing into her cunt, thick and as rough as the rest of him, and she throws her head back and grapples at his wrist and keens. He's shaking and she tastes his sweat as she humps herself upward and pushes him deeper, her nails scratching over the scars crisscrossing his chest and shoulders.

She would have learned them. All of them. Now she can barely _see_ them, she wants him so fucking bad. She can barely see anything clearly in the firelight. Except that he's so _big,_ looming over her, staring down at her with huge black eyes as he fucks his finger into her and heaves breath between his bared teeth.

Very sharp teeth.

 _Of course._

She fumbles with him at his belt, his fly, gets both of them open and worms her fingers into his pants as he shoves one-handed at his waistband, his finger still working in her. Maybe he's looming but when she gets his twitching cock in her hand - freezes again, just _holding_ it, she can hardly fucking believe it - he raises his face into the moonlight and what she sees there makes her want to weep.

This is familiar too.

 _I just wanted to get you that damn dog._

"I love you." He says it and she bites her lip hard enough to draw blood, bites back her sobbing, because if she starts now she doesn't honestly know if she'll be able to stop. He's leaning over her, _in_ her, cock thick and heavy in her hand and slick with precome, and every one of the three words is like a bullet fired point-blank through his chest from the inside. "I love you, Beth. Oh my _God,_ I love you."

He barely has time to kick the rest of his clothes away before she's taking him, spread so wide and wet for him, and guiding him in.

His hoarse cry harmonizes with hers, and then she sees it.

It's not there, his Hell. The room is shadows and moonlight, quiet except for their gasping and their trembling moans as he rolls deeper into her and drops his forehead against hers. But it _is_ there, all that fire, cackling darkness seething all around them, screams outside her shattered window and distorted shapes running and falling through the flames. The thing braced over her impales her, bottoms out, thrusts again, and it's so big it's _tearing_ at her, and she doesn't give a fuck. Scrabbling at rotting skin that peels off under her nails, snarling at him in a voice she doesn't even vaguely recognize, _fuck me, fuck me, stick your fat cock in my pussy and FUCK ME._

Old blood flaking onto her cheeks. Cool wriggle of maggots at her scalp.

Moonlight and his torn hands framing her face, his breath coming in strained whimpers as he moves inside her, rolling his hips in a hard, stuttering, uneven rhythm. It _hurts,_ what he's doing, but not in her cunt; it carves away at her heart, because when she combs his hair back from his face, his features are twisted in an expression she can only identify as agonized. He's fucking her and he _needs it_ and it's hurting him so bad, his lips against her cheekbone, and she can't tell if he's saying _I love you_ or _I'm sorry._

Both.

She nods their mouths together, parts his quivering lips with hers, and feels the cutting edges of razor blades on her tongue.

Moon. Roaring flame. She blinks and she sees both, superimposed, wrapping her legs around his waist and bucking up to meet him, trying to urge him on. Hissing _fuck me, Daryl, shit,_ please, _I fucking_ want _you, I love you, please._ Shining eyes and eyes that are nothing more than voids in his skull, hands clamped over the sides of her thighs and spreading her even wider as he pounds into her, harsh grunts, growls, hisses, malformed things that might be her name, her hands seizing every part of him she can reach as she jerks her body in time with his, and she's gouging bloody channels in his flesh as he bites viciously at her throat, as he kisses her, gasps that he _loves_ her, he _hates_ her, she's everything he wants and needs and he would do _anything_ for her, he would die for her again and again, she's a worthless slut and she's nothing to him except meat and a hole and she'll be exactly that for him after he murders her, and the flames devour them and the moon cascades down over them as she jams a hand between them and _slaps_ at her clit, and as he howls and spasms and pulses burning into her she _screams her ruined heart into him._

It's silent in the empty hallway, except for the gunshot. Her eyes are on his as the bullet slams through her skull and into his. She sees her blood spattering his lips. Tastes his on hers. It doesn't hurt. It's easy.

Got it right this time.

She's holding his hand, fingers weaved, as they go down together.

* * *

What she knows is that when she opens her eyes, there's no light at all. What she knows is that she's enclosed by him, his thin, powerful frame, his arms tight around her and his lips against her temple. What she knows is that he's still inside her, still wet between her legs, and she refuses to think about what that might mean. What she knows is that she's with him, and he's breathing and his heart is beating hard against hers, and he's alive. For another minute. Another ten. Half an hour. Maybe an hour. Maybe longer. As long as he can be.

What she knows is that they're both alive. They both made it. They're together. It's like it could have been. Like it was supposed to be.

That's all that ever mattered.

* * *

She has the gun.

There's no one else this time. There doesn't need to be. The others were only ever distractions. The important players in this drama were always only him and her, because in the end one of them dies so the other one can live, and the only meaningful questions are who.

How.

 _Why._

And of course by the time they come back here, even those questions are moot. Because he's so tired and he's in so much pain, and he asked her permission and she gave it. He asked her to help him and she will. He asked her to get it right and she'll do that too, and she's no doctor but she knows she can make him better. It's very simple. It always was.

She has the gun, here in this hallway where the light and the angles and the shapes and sounds and _everything_ is Wrong, with the chance to do it over and make it right. She can. She's strong enough.

She loves him that much.

He's on his knees before her, filthy and bloody and so wounded, so weak it's a wonder he can stay upright at all. Ready to crumple even without what she's going to do to him. So she won't make him wait, she won't extend the cruelty; she levels the gun at him and presses the muzzle against his forehead, and this is where he smiles and thanks her, says he loves her.

In his own way, he says that goodbye both of them hate.

Except this is wrong too.

He's not smiling. He's cringing back from her, hands rising feebly in what's clearly a hopeless effort to shield himself, and his usually weary eyes are wide and terrified. He's shaking his head. He's whimpering.

 _No. No. Beth, don't, I- I changed my mind. I don't want to._

But he has to. Consternation wrinkles her features. Why doesn't he understand? He's in agony, he's sick far beyond the possibility of recovery - every breath, every beat of his heart, every second of life is _torture_ for him. It's better this way. Better for him, better for everyone. He never should have made it. It was a mistake. She can correct it. She can free him. She can make it stop.

She can make him better.

But he's scrambling backward, one bloody hand upraised. _Please. No, Beth. Beth, please, I won't be like that anymore. I can get better. I can try. I swear, I'll try._

No. Trying is part of the _problem._ She steps forward, gun aimed - not that she even needs her spectacular aim at this distance, but the business would be a whole lot faster and a whole lot easier if he would just hold _still._ If he would stop fighting. Stop trying. If he would accept that he doesn't belong here, that he doesn't belong anywhere. That he never will.

 _Beth._ Dropping his hand, shivering. Looking up at her - tears glistening in his eyes. Overflowing. Falling like rain. _I love you._

 _I can be all right._

No. He really can't.

As she squeezes the trigger and watches him collapse in a boneless splatter of blood and brain, she reflects musingly that this is the first gunshot she's ever heard that sounded like the shattering of glass.

Not that it matters.

* * *

She's awake for a while before she realizes that she is.

Lying on her side, sheet tangled around her bare legs. She's naked, skin and hair sweat-damp, something else sticky between her thighs, and she's sore. She's sore everywhere, but especially she's sore _down there,_ her hamstrings feeling strained and pulled, muscles tight, and a strange and not altogether unpleasant burning ache in her vulva, her labia, deeper inside her.

Odd.

Another indeterminate length of time and she's on her back and gazing up into the darkness, feeling idly over her mound and the clumped curls there, and her other hand passes over the remains of the warm depression in the mattress next to her.

And her sluggish brain snaps to full alert, and she knows.

He was here. Now he's not.

There seems to be no transition between lying on her back and sitting upright. She's moved instantly from one state to the other, turning at the waist and groping mindlessly for the sheet - not even to cover herself. She has no idea what she would be covering herself for. There's no one in the house at all except him.

Because he _is_ still here. She knows it with that terrible dream-certainty, and as she gets to her feet and feels the flat solidity of the floor under her, it occurs to her that this might actually _be_ a dream, that her dreams have become so vivid and so intense that anything might be possible.

He was lost in his own nightmare. She met him there,

She can't be completely positive she made it out.

She calls his name as she moves slowly toward the door. Her voice is unnaturally loud and unnaturally _immediate,_ as if she's yelling in her own ears even though her call was low, and she flinches, blinks into the darkness beyond her open doorway. The moon must have set, the lamps outside at their dimmest, and they're in the final few storied Darkest Hours Before the Dawn. A hollow laugh stirs in her chest but makes it no further than that as she steps out into the hall and stands for a few seconds, listening.

There is a distinct difference between the quality of empty silence and the quality of silence in which someone is present. The end of the world didn't teach it to her. She doesn't remember when she learned it. She suspects that it's not knowledge unique to her, though she's never encountered it articulated in any way, and wouldn't know how to begin to do so if asked. She simply knows the difference, and the silence that greets her is a silence full of _him_.

He's waiting for her in the dark.

 _Get your gun._ Hissed voice inside her ear - not Maggie, not Rick, and not herself. It sounds eerily like _him,_ coarsely urgent. _Go back and get your damn gun. Get your knife. Fuckin' hell, get_ somethin', _just don't you_ dare _go out there unarmed._

 _You promised her._

Yes. But she lied.

She's already walking, the darkness encircling her like his arms.

There are only a very limited number of places it would make sense for him to be - the kitchen, maybe, or on one of the porches, front or back - but in all likelihood he's not making sense. Not to her, not to any other external observer, and least of all to himself. The basic logic according to which he operates might be familiar to her, but that doesn't mean his logic doesn't break down. It doesn't mean it can't vanish, and then who the fuck knows what might drive him, and where it might drive him to.

He could be anywhere.

She can see a slightly lighter darkness just ahead that must be the back end of the front hall, a darker set of lines that have to be the stairs. Immediately to her right is the entrance to the kitchen, and as she turns and peers into it with one hand on the wall, she thinks about the knifeblock on the counter, the gleam of all that chrome and steel, and she's a few steps in before he seizes her by the hair and jerks her head back, yanks her against him and bares his impossibly sharp teeth against her ear as he cuts her throat in a single neat slice and sprays all that shiny chrome with her blood.

She closes her eyes and breathes deep. No. Not like that.

She's not totally certain he would make it that quick.

He's not in there anyway. She doesn't have to look in order to know. The silence there is empty. She turns away.

The porches. Living room. Dining room. Upstairs. There is, she thinks with a brief shudder, the basement. But there's also one other very obvious place, and maybe its obviousness is why she didn't think of it immediately. She pauses again, frowning and wondering at herself - because now something is wrong. She _knows_ it. She's known it since before she was up, since before she was even fully awake. But it's slipping through her fingers, fluttering into the dark like a moth. Softer than an echo. The memory of a memory of something she heard in a dream.

Downstairs bathroom. Really the first place she should have checked. It wasn't carelessness. She's not careless like that anymore.

Something in her mind blocked it off.

She stumbles back against the wall, hands flying to her mouth, inhaling like the stab of a blade.

Like a fucking _shard of glass._

Her feet thump against the hardwood as she runs. _Sprints._ How long ago was it? How long ago did she come out of that dream? How long has she been dozing alone in bed, lazy and stupid and _useless,_ and by how much time will she be too late? Even broken, his mind devours details. His power of retention is considerable even on his worst days. She knows he remembers. He asked her. _He fucking asked her,_ and he looked so sad and so afraid when he did, and he looked like a man who saw something coming, something horrible, and knew it couldn't possibly be avoided or evaded.

 _How did you know you didn't want to?_

Now she's almost _sure_ she's in a nightmare. Only in a nightmare could she be moving this slowly, each individual footfall like a thunderclap, her arms swinging, catching herself with one hand on the wall as she rounds the corner. In a nightmare you run like this, like running through tar, and you know it doesn't matter anyway, but you still run and you still torture yourself with the hope that you might be in time.

Though a small voice, the smallest yet, is murmuring _Stop. Stop now. Go back to bed._

 _Leave him be._

She slams into the door with both hands, fumbles desperately at the knob. He'll have locked it. _She_ locked it, she knew she only had a few minutes at best and they would be coming to stop her, and he'll have remembered that too, used her as a fucking _model-_

But the door swings easily open.

And the moon hasn't completely set after all.

The last thin stream of it is trickling through the frosted windowpanes and pooling on the tile, turning off-white to snow. It catches the broken shards of mirror and makes ice of them, ponds and lakes and rivers set in a vast flat tundra. It would be utterly pristine, if not for the streaks and puddles of black all over the floor, over the tile and the shattered glass and his naked legs folded in front of him where he leans back against the wall by the sink, his hands lying palm-up at his sides, the fingers of his right curled loosely around the long, thin makeshift blade he used to slash his arms.

His head is turned toward the window. His eyes are open. The moonlight sinks into them and is gone.

There was no transition between lying down and sitting up. There's no transition between standing in the doorway and on her knees in front of him. Dimly she feels glass cutting into her and she doesn't care. She can't possibly care about that, because it's happening again, it's happening _again,_ she's kneeling on the floor with his blood on her, on her hands as she gropes for him, the sweet metallic stench of it filling her nose and mouth. She's reaching for him like she can do anything at all, and her own weeping is locked behind her heart, and all she can do is stare at him, at the long cruel cuts on his wrists and forearms, at all the fucking _blood,_ and her shaking fingertips smear it down his cold cheeks to his mouth.

And he turns his head, very slowly, and blinks at her.

 _Nightmare,_ she's screaming silently at herself. _NightmarenightmarenightmareWAKETHEFUCKUP_ because it _has_ to be, because he hasn't turned, because he's _looking_ at her with all that moonlight in his eyes, and this is somehow the worst one she's ever had.

The worst since it actually happened.

But then he raises his left hand and touches her, a single blood-black fingertip trailing down a single strand of her hair, and he mouths her name.

"You didn't." She doesn't have the first idea what she means. "You _didn't,_ you-"

"You never wanted to," he whispers, and his hand drops back into his lap as his eyes slip closed. He releases a very long breath, and pulls another one in. "The way you cut. That's how it was. Before you even went in that fuckin' bathroom. You never… You never wanted to at all."

As she grabs frantically for towels and presses them against his arms, she glances up and sees that he's smiling.

It's a beautiful smile.


	37. tell me that this one has flown

**Note:** No, this fic is not done yet. It's very, very close to done - I'm into the last couple of chapters - and more than one person has been like I FUCKING NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS so I'm going to go ahead and at least post the next one right now. I mean, clearly, because you're reading this.

No, we are not done. Not by a long shot. Hoo boy.

I need to note that while I do try to do at least minimum due diligence when it comes to medical details, I may have fudged/handwaved some things here for the convenience of the plot. I may have also fudged/handwaved some things because it is really, really, really not fun doing Google searches for the details of techniques for committing suicide by slashing your wrists, and there was a limited amount I was willing to put myself through. I'm sure you can understand.

Thanks for reading. ❤️ One more push to the finish line.

* * *

 **Chapter 37: tell me that this one has flown**

 _The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He knows it's dawn. But he can't see it.

This has happened before. It happened more than once while he was traveling north. It happened more than once while he was in the hospital. He would be wakeful all night and then, when the sun should have risen, the night remained. He could hear birds. He could feel the sun. But the world was dark and through that dark world he moved, navigating by sound like a bat, by touch and by the subtle differentiation of the shadows. He got good at it. He learned to exist without light. He learned to find comfort in the dark. Those absences of daylight were when he made friends with those shadows. When he came to love them.

Now they're lingering around him. He knows it's dawn but the dawn doesn't touch him.

She does. She shouldn't be. He stays still and allows her to do it, feels her binding up his arms and wrists where he cut them open. She's trembling and he thinks perhaps he should reach for her and pull her close, but the effort presents itself as far beyond him. He's freezing but he doesn't shiver and it doesn't bother him. What bothers him is that she doesn't _understand_. Somehow she didn't see it. Didn't feel. The image beaming from his eyes like a film projected against a screen, so vivid and so clear.

He shot her full of bolts. He jammed the muzzle of that gun against her forehead and he pulled the trigger. Her pillows and sheets were soaked in her blood. He felt it pump warm and sticky and sweet all over his hands, onto his tongue. More blood was welling up in her mouth as he kissed her, as he lifted her thighs against his hips and fucked her, continued fucking her long after she was still and cold. He was going to keep her with him, keep her in the trunk and the coffin with him while she was fresh and even after she wasn't so fresh anymore, kiss her bloody lips, play with her, love her, fuck her whenever he felt the urge to do so. Do anything to her, whenever he wanted. Forever.

She's _his,_ and no one is ever going to take her away from him again.

She's sharp. She stabs. She dissects him. She has to have seen that inside him, that fantasy. That dream. She has to know how _sick_ he is, coming inside her stiffening corpse, coming all over his fist as he blew his own sick brain all over the wall, and she has to know that it's cruel to force an animal this sick to keep living.

He loves her so _much,_ so she has to understand.

But she's stopping the bleeding. She's slapping his cheeks, making him stay awake. She's saying things about _Denise,_ her voice so tight and rough and choked with tears, and he wants to stroke her face and tell her that it's okay, she can let him go. She doesn't have to keep trying to save him.

Except he knows he failed anyway. _Again,_ he failed.

Then by some hellish miracle he's up, leaning so heavily on her that she's practically carrying him, staggering on numb feet and equally numb legs. Cloth against his naked skin; wasn't she naked too? She was. She stripped herself, stripped him. She held him so close. He was inside her and she was so warm and wet, and she was _alive_ and she was receiving him, she said she _wanted_ him, she _loved_ him, she wasn't disgusted by him and she didn't detest him.

Because she can't see and she doesn't understand.

Forward movement. He trusts it like he trusts her, which is to say implicitly and not at all. He doesn't know where she's taking him and yet he knew the second she said the name. _Denise._ Slow stupid bitch can't help him but she'll try anyway. She'll try regardless of what he wants or doesn't want, regardless of what he says.

She won't let him go.

(He was aware, as he used the glass to carve the hard channels across his arms, that he was mimicking the angle of her scar. From the smallest, youngest iterations of the idea, she has been his model and his guide, and he couldn't escape her example even then. He knew perfectly well that she had failed too, that perhaps in the end her example wasn't the best one, yet he couldn't diverge from it. She was leading him and he couldn't untangle his fingers from hers. Possibly because in those last moments he couldn't bear the thought of entering that final darkness alone.)

(Possibly even now he would do anything to not be alone.)

The squeak of hinges and cool air on his face, carding through his damp hair. The trill of a bird his mind is too muddy to identify. He still can't see it but he can imagine: a soft pink sky, sun not yet visible, breeze stirring the treetops. The pale gold of her hair in the corner of his vision, the strands catching that pink light, flushed like kissed skin. Everything quiet, careful and delicate in the way the earliest minutes of dawn always are. No fires burn. No one is laughing, screaming, dying with their skin bubbling and their hair in flames. His demons haven't returned.

It's beautiful, and it hurts him and as she hauls him onward and pavement scrapes the bottoms of his feet, he's glad he can't see it.

That it's there and he's apparently alive in it is bad enough.

Walking. Something he wasn't supposed to do anymore. He wasn't supposed to do any of this anymore. He wasn't supposed to do _anything_ anymore. He's not angry at her, listening to her panting against him - panting that sounds much closer to sobs - and he barely even resents her. But she doesn't _get it._

And if she doesn't, who will?

He moans softly and totters, and she grunts and curses and keeps him on his hateful, useless feet. She won't let him fall.

She won't let him _go._

But she can't keep all of him here. She can make him walk and for now it seems that she can make him live, but she can't keep the rest of him from wandering. Drifting away on that soft morning breeze. Sinking in slow gradations back into the empty dark.

He never left the whispering darkness anyway. This is where he truly lives.

This is where he belongs.

* * *

Later, every fucking step of the way is a singular blur.

She knows the steps were individual and that they followed a familiar course. She knows there were stages, locations, landmarks. She knows that before she started dragging a naked bleeding man down the street, other things happened. It's possible that he spoke to her again. It's possible that she said things to him. It's more than possible that she was weeping as she put desperate pressure on his wounds, worked to stop the blood's sluggish flow. It's likely that she believed it was pointless, that he was dead already, and that she should simply lay him back down, make him as comfortable as she could, and be ready to either get her knife or hammer that shard of glass into his ear.

None of that shit matters. It's fine with her that she can't remember any of it with any reliability. In the end, all she cares about is that Denise comes to the door after what feels like mere hours of banging, blinking and groggy, and that while her eyes snap wide and horrified behind her glasses as soon as she focuses on the two of them, at the same moment she's moving.

When the Wolves came, her steel emerged. Now it breaks the surface again.

"Beth, what the _fuck-_ Get him in here."

He's walking. Staggering, more like, and her whole side is moaning from bearing almost all of his weight, but he's still on his feet. But he's also gone. He hasn't been there for a while. And while maybe this should have her panicked, all she can feel is relief.

Because if he's not there, he probably won't hurt himself worse.

Tara meets them halfway down the hall to the kitchen in boxers and a loose tee, scratching her head sleepily, but she snaps to full alert just as fast as Denise did when she sees them, and she rushes forward to help. Not asking for explanations. Beth can just manage to find the strength to be grateful as she steps aside and nearly falls against the wall, hugging her middle, fighting back her shudders and trying not to look down at her front and arms and hands. Her shirt and the pair of jeans she threw on in a roaring haze.

She got his blood all over herself. That keeps happening.

She should help. She wants to help. She doesn't know what she wants. She wants to wake the fuck _up._ She closes her eyes and when she opens them she sees flames licking up the walls and a shape crouching at the far end of the hall, unmoving, featureless except for the metallic gleam of its teeth as it grins at her.

She clenches her jaw. _I fucking hate you._

His madness is catching. Like a fire.

Voices. Not frightened but tense. She shoves herself away from the wall and stumbles into the kitchen, nearly runs into Tara on her way out. Tara hardly glances at her but Beth can guess without being told: supplies from the clinic. What supplies, she can't for the moment imagine, and that makes her feel stupid all over again, because she's her father's daughter and even if he never formally taught her medicine she picked up the basics.

And then she sees him and everything else falls to pieces.

He's sitting with his nightmarishly scarred back to her, slumped on the kitchen island with Denise bending over him and holding one of his forearms as she swabs it with a damp cloth. Her eyes are narrow, mouth tight with concentration - grim but not extremely so. And he's _sitting up._

He's not dead. And Denise isn't looking at him like she expects him to be at any moment.

She glances up as Beth approaches, mouth tightening further - and Daryl twitches. Half turns his head. Seems to have exhausted his remaining resources with that and halts, slumps still more.

"He's not…" Beth starts, her voice so thin and dry in her own ears, and then runs out of her own steam and stops. But Denise must be able to intuit what the rest of the sentence would have been, because she shakes her head. Though she says nothing.

She could walk around the island. See his face. See if she can discern anything that can explain this, because she understands it, he asked her _permission,_ but she also doesn't in the least comprehend how and why. That he would do it like _that,_ leave himself there for her to find him, leave himself to fucking _turn…_

So maybe she understands that part after all.

Denise doesn't ask her over to assist, and she doesn't want to see his face. Can't. The lights in the kitchen are full of hard glare and they make her eyes sting like the memory of smoke. She sags against the wall and slides down to sit, her knees drawn up against her chest and her arms wrapping around them. She closes her eyes again and listens to the refrigerator's hum, the waking birds outside, the sound of the front door opening and Tara's hurrying footsteps in the hall, and his breathing and the slow pound of his heart - which she's sure isn't her imagination. She can hear it. It's that loud. It's that _real._

This isn't a nightmare. There's nothing to wake up from.

She lowers her forehead to the tops of her knees and quietly cries herself into a doze.

* * *

Blurs of movement. Light, but not dawn. The darkness hasn't been pierced. Nothing can pierce it. He blinks owlishly and tracks the blur, lets it flow into him. Lets himself flow into it. This is like waking up in the hospital, only without the hideous pain, but then there's pain after all as _he's_ pierced, sharp bright jabs in his arms working into a swift rhythm, and he groans and sways where he's sitting.

Lucid enough to find it bizarre that he's sitting at all.

 _Where is she?_ He tries to ask. She was with him and that was good, even if she wouldn't let him go. She was so sweet to him. She was so much sweeter than he could ever possibly deserve. He loves her so much it's excruciating, so much his blood is boiling in his veins, and he had to cut them open to release the pressure. But he wants to tell her that he's sorry. He said he would hurt her and he did.

Didn't he?

If he can see her, he'll know.

 _Beth._

The blur touching him now is not Beth.

The blur touching him is tugging him, down and then onto his feet. Draping something over his shoulders. He jerks, snarls - or he tries to. Doesn't want her touching him. Doesn't want _anyone_ touching him. Christ, why can't they just fucking leave him _alone?_

No, don't. Please don't. Holding onto her - solid frame, more so than _hers._ Still not her. Please don't leave him alone. He'll do anything. They're gone, the horrors in the corners, crawling and rotting, screaming and laughing and taunting him - and the worst one, _him_ \- and he misses them. In his aching head, he's crying for them to come back. They've been his companions almost since he woke up into horrifying life and now without them he's so fucking _scared._ The dark is so big and there are so many shadows, and they aren't his friends.

If he dies he'll go to them and he'll never escape. His Hell will be them. Them and no one else, forever, and whatever torment they can think to visit on him.

They're making him walk again and he whimpers. Suffering. Contrition. If she can just forgive him. If she can just do that.

If she can hear him.

Not even sure who he means.

Time contracts. It doesn't owe him comprehension. There's a shockingly brief eternity of walking and then a familiar antiseptic smell and the familiar warm light and gleam of metal. Actual sunlight now and much too bright, and he cringes and sobs, and the two strong shoulders under his arms are bearing him back into the shade. He's so grateful to them, he'll never be able to say how much.

He gave up. They didn't.

Stairs. He trips on the first one and nearly pitches forward head-first, but they hold him. Guide him upward. He climbs, gasping for breath - but it's easier than he would have expected, and time contracts again, because he takes one of those dense breaths and then they're laying him back on a bed, pulling covers up over him, and he's curling into them and shivering. He's not safe in a bed but it doesn't matter, because he's not safe anywhere.

Except with her.

And her hands are on his face now - he knows they're hers, he would know them anywhere. Her cool fingers. He moans and feels himself opening under them, unfurling. He should have died with this touch on him, on an equally cool floor. Wanted to. Two separate floors to die on, months apart. Fucking hell, if she would have just _let him go._

He gropes for her. Finds her wrists. Thinks about the pale scar there. He was trying to be like her, like she could have been. The gold halo of her hair as she bends over him. Her lovely glowing eyes the color of clear morning.

 _I'm sorry._

 _I love you._

Those cool fingers in his hair carry him the last few feet into sleep.

* * *

"He's probably going to be fine." Denise's mouth twists and she crosses her arms, leaning back against the wall. She doesn't look as tired as Beth feels, but it's not too far off. "Or you know what I mean. He's not fine. He's not even close to fine. I don't think he has the first clue what _fine_ even means."

"He'll live," Beth whispers. Not a question.

They're standing outside the tiny bedroom, morning light streaming in through the window at the end of the hall. It's brilliant, clear. It's going to be a beautiful day. Behind the mostly closed door a couple feet away, Daryl Dixon is unconscious with saline flowing gently into his veins.

Yes. For whatever it's worth. For a given value of _life._

"What he did to himself isn't going to kill him." Denise looks down, eyes falling shut for a few seconds, then raises her head again. "There were a bunch of cuts, yeah, but almost all of them were shallow. Superficial. He didn't touch an artery. I only really needed to stitch a couple. I know it looked like a lot of blood - shit, it _was_ a lot of blood - but even if you hadn't found him when you did, it would've taken him a while to bleed out like that."

"Yeah." Still a whisper. She's barely spoken above a whisper since she practically collapsed across Denise's threshold. She doesn't have it in her. She bled with him and she's drained.

Even though he filled her.

She swipes her hands down her face, presses her fingertips against her closed eyelids. She knew already. Or some part of her knew. Looked at him and what he'd done and recognized it, even as she was certain he had succeeded where she failed.

"Beth," Denise says softly. "If he was really trying to kill himself, he would be dead right now."

Beth drops her hands. They bump limply against the wall. He said he didn't know how much longer he could _do this._

Neither does she.

"So what the hell was he doing?"

"I dunno." Denise is quiet a moment, head turned and brow furrowed as she looks back at the door and the silent dimness beyond. He's laid out in there like a corpse on a slab, even if he's alive. Laid out like he's ready for embalming. Burial.

 _Don't you think that's beautiful?_

"I dunno," Denise repeats. Murmurs. "Maybe he was trying to try."

* * *

She goes back to the house. Not hers. Returning to her own house for the clothes he was wearing when he came to her would be the smart move, so of course that's not what she does. She goes to _his,_ and Rick opens the door, and it never could have gone any other way.

She tells him and she sees his knees weaken. Yet at the same time he doesn't look remotely surprised.

 _He'll live._ No. It's not like that.

This is merely not what will kill him.

She meant to go inside and force her feet to carry her into that awful room, find him some clothes, boots, take them back to him and do… She doesn't know. She isn't thinking past the next step in front of her. She was going to figure it out when she got there, if at all. And she - dully - wanted to hurry, because the cheerful sun is higher and it's nearly mid-morning, but he's out cold, weak, and he doesn't need clothes immediately, and she doesn't really believe anything else can happen right now. There isn't actually much to hurry for.

So she finds herself sitting on the porch, head hanging almost between her knees, Rick's hand heavy and warm between her shoulderblades.

Unless they were overheard, no one else knows yet.

She doesn't want them to. Not now.

"You were right."

He makes a soft, quizzical noise, and she pushes her hair out of the way and raises her head enough to look at him sidelong. He has to already know what she means.

"I fucked him." She lifts her hand to her mouth, teeth working at the jagged edge of a broken thumbnail. "I made it worse."

She didn't. She's pretty sure. But naturally she can't shake the conviction that she did. She made it worse because she always makes it worse. She got him _killed._ In her dreams she kills him again and again. What the fuck else could she _ever_ do except make it worse?

She's staring out at the street, at nothing. In the periphery of her unfocused vision, she sees Rick shake his head.

"If he really wants to, he's gonna find a way. You don't control that."

She's about to open her mouth, about to tell him he's full of _shit,_ because whatever share of the blame is due to her, she has power over Daryl that she doesn't even completely understand, but then she sees how Rick is looking at her.

He never said anything to her about it. She was never certain how much he even knew at the time, though Lori had to have told him. Everybody had to have known at least some of it. But he never brought it up, and she's never known what he thought about it, or what he thinks now.

But he has to know that Lori wanted to stop her, and Andrea wanted to give her room to run or not to run. And in the end that was how it went. She found a way, and she chose not to take it. She chose not to run. Whether or not she _failed…_

She's no longer sure about that.

 _If he was really trying to kill himself, he would be dead right now._

It would be so wonderful to be able to believe it's over.

She sighs and drops her face into her hands. "I got so much blood to clean up."

"I'll help you."

"No." Immediate. Hard. Her gut twists as she thinks of it, her and Rick on their knees in the bathroom, both on the floor again with their hands stained by Daryl's blood, and she doesn't know if she can take that. She's borne so much in the last twenty-four hours. The last few weeks. Last few _months._ That might be a bridge too far. That might shatter a back already strained to the breaking point.

He's silent. Doesn't argue. She's coldly grateful.

Her gratitude doesn't stop her from asking what she asks next. She knows it's cruel before it passes her lips, and she knows it's rabidly unfair, but last night was cruel to her and so was this morning, and perhaps she needs a target to shoot it at, what she's unable to contain.

It wouldn't be the first time she took it out on him. Wouldn't be the first time he let her.

"Can you do it yet?"

"Do what?"

"Lose him again."

More silence. It has a frozen quality, and his hand slips away from her back. Her jaw clenches so hard she feels her teeth move in their sockets. _Bitch._ Daryl might hate himself for saying it but he isn't wrong. _Heartless bitch._

Rick is not the only one here she's trying to hurt.

"Can you?"

His voice is flat. But it's not hard, not pointed. He's not stabbing at her. He's not trying to strike back. If anything, she senses a note of terse appreciation. This is the situation they're in, and they're in it together. They have been for months, and the question is a perfectly valid one. This morning it feels more valid than ever, and if one person on this porch should be asking it of themselves, it's her.

She clung to Daryl and she told him she couldn't. And what he told her, not in so many words but in every way that mattered, was that it wasn't all about her and what she can and can't do. She's not the only one who might be asked to do the impossible. She's not the only one who's facing down her own failure.

She hugs her knees to her chest. She's been doing that a lot lately. Holding onto herself. Holding herself together. "Like you said. I don't know if I have a choice anymore."

 _I don't know if I ever did._

"I never thought I would."

She looks at him. He's not looking at her now. He's gazing up at the offensively bright, clear sky, a blue sky in early summer - the kind of sky that used to fill her with the warm flush of everything else the summer would hold. School out and the days like broad, warm hands that cupped themselves beneath her and carried her from simple childish pleasure to simple childish pleasure. She loved days like this. She loved so many things, before she loved a family of broken people and a man who often has to struggle to remember how to be human, and another man who no longer remembers what being human feels like at all.

A man who is _trying to try_ to die.

"What d'you mean?"

Rick shrugs. "He was this… He was a _fixture_. Y'know? He was this permanent thing. He was so solid. A couple times I thought he might leave, and I figured we might lose him like we lost both of you for a while and not find him, but I never thought it would be like _that._ He survived everything. I guess I started thinking it was like nothing could kill him." He laughs. It's painful to hear. "I was so fuckin' stupid."

She turns her head, lays her temple against the cap of her knee. "You didn't get him killed."

"Neither did you."

"You know that's bullshit." She draws a huge, shuddering breath. She's cried out. That's all gone too. "You were _there._ "

He lowers his head, stares down at his slightly curled hands where they hang between his thighs. "Yeah. I was. I remember, Beth. I remember every goddamn second."

"He's not Shane."

She doesn't mean to be cruel this time. But he snaps his head up, and he doesn't reel back, doesn't even move, but she knows she's as good as slapped him.

Again.

"I know he's not Shane," he whispers. "I know that."

She swallows. Too late to take it back. She's not totally positive she wants to. "Do you?"

"Don't talk about Shane. Don't you ever." He's shaking. Not much, not something she might even have noticed unless she knew what she was looking for, looking _at,_ but he is. His hands. His shoulders, his lips. His voice. He's staring at her and he's _shaking,_ and it's not exactly the same, in many ways not at all, but she's seen it. An emotion that transcends pain and fury and becomes something new.

 _I don't even know how to say what he was._

He's staring at her and shaking, and for a fraction of a fraction of a second she wonders if he might be about to take the slap and pay her back in kind.

"I'm sorry," she breathes, and slowly it fades, and he looks away, jaw working.

She should get the clothes. Boots. Get out of here. Figure out what to do about the blood. Or just go back to him and climb into bed beside him, take whatever Denise can give her and sleep for as long as she's able. Because she _can't_ give up.

She's trapped.

She's starting to rise when he speaks, and she stops.

"You replay it in your head. Over and fuckin' over, you see it. Shit you could've done differently. Ways you could've stopped it. Things you should've seen. You come up with all these plans, like someday someone will hand you a damn time machine and you'll get a chance to go back and make it right. But you never do. You never can. You can't save anyone. In the end all you do is watch them die again."

He closes his eyes and ducks his head, and she's gripped by the sudden and unwelcome urge to reach for him and run her fingers through his hair. Try to show him she's sorry, if the words are failing her. "Or you kill them."

There is no scenario, in this world or any other, in which she has anything to say to that.

Laughter, two voices. Together they look up and there's Spencer walking by with Aaron, both of them carrying things. Spencer has a cooler. Aaron has a couple sixpacks of beer.

Spencer looks up and waves. Aaron follows suit. They're smiling, happy, as if early this morning Daryl Dixon didn't try to bleed to death all over her bathroom floor. It's bizarre. Even as she raises a hand to return the wave, she's bewildered by it.

Beer. Why the hell is there _beer?_

Rick releases a heavy sigh as they pass. "That fuckin' party."

 _What party?_ she's opening her mouth to say, and then it comes back to her. What Denise said. The party she was supposed to think about going to. The party she was supposed to think about taking _Daryl_ to.

Denise might not be so strongly in favor of that now.

"I'm not goin'."

"I have to. Little while, anyway. I need to talk to Deanna." The name slices out of him, bitter. "I was gonna make a case for taking him off _probation._ "

"What will you say?"

"I dunno. About this? Nothing. Not if I can help it." He squeezes his eyes shut, pinches the bridge of his nose as if he's fighting an oncoming headache. "I'll tell Michonne and Carol later. Keep it quiet for now."

Another wave of gratitude, this time not cold. This time fierce. Rick can be a pigheaded fool, arrogant to the point of idiocy, and then he can turn around and be shrewd as hell, all manipulative diplomacy. Careful aggression, smoothly threatening. Reasonable in the manner of a man who'll be pleased to transact things peacefully or slit throats without batting an eye. Then in his weaker moments he might seem like he's teetering on the edge of control, desperate, and sometimes it'll be genuine, but sometimes not. Many times not.

She's wondered if he can tell the difference anymore.

"Denise has been keepin' everythin' to herself."

He glances up at her, nods. He's pulling inward, features hardening and his eyes distant and cool. Thinking.

Holding the fucking situation together.

"He's in the clinic for a while?"

She nods.

"I wanna come see him. After. Later tonight."

She manages a smile. It wrenches at the corner of her mouth and feels like it has far more in common with a wince. "He ain't goin' anywhere."

He nods again. The look he gives her isn't a smile, but it's not completely unlike one. Tight and grim as hers, but somehow it makes her feel better to see it.

Whatever _better_ means now. Whatever it ever meant.

She turns and goes into the house, and step by step, she drags herself to his room.

* * *

She can't tell if it's better or worse, being in that place with him far from it and with everything that's happened. What she knows, standing in the center of the room and scanning through the gloom for where he keeps his clothes, is that she hates it every bit as much as she did the first day she walked into it and she wants to be out of it as soon as possible.

Out, and never come back if she can help it. And if somehow she can make it so _he_ never comes back, that might in so many ways be ideal.

Depending.

Shirt. Jeans. Belt. Underwear and socks, his boots discarded by the stripped bed. She collects these things and exits without a look back. In particular she doesn't look back at his nest, not least because the blanket was left folded in such a way that it resembles the humped shape of a body curled under it. As if he never left, as if part of him is still here and always will be. Trapped and never freed.

No _as if._ It strikes her as an entirely reasonable idea, if not a probable one.

Rick is gone from the porch by the time she steps back onto it. She sees no one else on her way out. The idea that any higher power - except a deeply sadistic one - is guiding any of this terrible course of events is ludicrous by now, but she breathes a prayer of thanks anyway.

One foot in front of the other, arms full of things she would give anything to not be carrying, she returns to the clinic.

* * *

He's still asleep.

She's unsure whether she should think of it as _sleep._ Denise calls it that when she meets her at the door, but it doesn't seem to fit. He's _unconscious._ Maybe he's resting. Maybe it's a good thing. It _is_ a good thing, so far as his body goes. But she's not fool enough to think there's peace here, or that there will be. At some point he'll wake up lucid, discover that he's alive, and fuck knows what happens then.

How much longer?

She leaves Denise downstairs in the main room and goes up to him.

It's dim in there. He looks like she left him, hasn't moved at all that she can see, clear tube running from the needle in his bandaged arm and a thin beam of light from the mostly curtained window glancing off the bag of saline hanging from the IV stand by the bed. Didn't need whole blood. Didn't lose enough, somehow. She knows - and forgot in the fog of her panic - that the human body can lose a shocking amount of blood before it truly ceases to function.

He likely hadn't been in the bathroom for all that long. She was in time.

 _For what?_

She puts the clothes down on the foot of the bed. Sits on the edge, beside him. Gazes at him for a while. The shadows, as always, have gathered thickest around him. His eyes are motionless beneath his lids.

She could hit him. Just completely sucker punch him. Beat at his head, claw at his face. Scream obscenities at him, hate, every abuse she can think of. How dare he. How _could_ he. He never had permission. Not from her. Why the fuck did he _ask_ for it _,_ if it didn't make any difference to him in the end?

Unless it did. Because apparently he wasn't really trying.

She lays a hand against his cheek - he's still cool. Her fingers are very steady as she sweeps his hair back from his brow. There is no peace here, but looking at him now, she could almost believe there is. His face is relaxed, tension lines smoothed out. No dreams appear to plague him. She considers everything blood can contain, how they used to believe that you could cure sickness by bleeding out the poison at its heart. How amazing it would be if they turned out to be correct in the end. If he opens his eyes and they're clear and bright and he's himself again, for always, all his darkness seeped away, and he lifts a hand and strokes his fingertips down her face and whispers her name. Not like he did. Not like goodbye.

Like he's finally greeting her.

 _I love you._

She mouths it silently. Closes her eyes. Folds at the waist and lays her head on his chest and listens to the slow beat of his heart as he rises and falls like an ocean.

She's so tired.

It's possible that only now is she understanding the full degree to which they're in the same damn boat.

At least they aren't in there alone.


	38. let me steal this moment from you now

**Note:** Okay, so I wrote what I'm pretty sure is the next-to-next-to-last chapter today. I anticipate finishing tomorrow or the day after, so I'm going to start dispensing these. Expect the chapter after this to be posted sometime tomorrow night.

We're moving toward some really difficult stuff. But it's almost over. Take that how you want to.

❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 38: let me steal this moment from you now**

 _The wind blows and it makes a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there no one else? His hands keep turning into birds, and his hands keep flying away from him. Eventually the birds must land._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She thinks she must sleep, and for a significant time, because when she next opens her eyes the light has changed, and so has the quality of his breathing. It's a little quicker, a little shallower. He's not yet restless, but whatever merciful depths he was in, he's beginning to emerge from them.

She watches him for a short while longer, her hand on his breastbone. Then she gets up and goes downstairs and finds Denise and Tara talking in the front room. Something about _party._

Judging by the light, it's getting on to late afternoon.

They both look up as she comes in, and Denise starts to get up from her swivel chair, but Beth waves her back down, rakes a hand through her hair. It feels like she hasn't brushed it in weeks. She badly wants a shower. The bathroom she uses is covered in blood, but there's always the one upstairs.

Christ.

"How's he doing?" Tara's voice is soft, serious, and Beth shrugs. It would be great to have an actual answer to that question.

"I guess he's okay. He's still- He's still _asleep_."

It still doesn't fit.

Denise nods. "Good. He needs it. And who knows." She gives Beth a tiny smile that skirts the border of grim. "He might even wake up feeling a lot better."

Might. Beth returns the smile with exactly as much humor, but it's true. It's possible. Not likely, but it could happen.

"What were you saying about the party?"

The word is worse than _asleep_ to her, feels far more uncomfortable in her mouth. It has an edge of obscenity. It would have anyway, even without Daryl in that fucking bed upstairs with a fucking IV drip in his arm. This isn't the first _party_ she's been witness to since she got here, and she hasn't improved in her opinions on the practice.

In his best possible state of mind, Daryl would never in a million years have wanted to get within thirty yards of such an abomination.

"I was saying Denise should go." Tara rolls a shoulder. "I know it's stupid, but I'm gonna show for a while, and I don't wanna be all awkward all by myself."

"I _can't._ " Denise's tone isn't exactly snappish, but it's the tone of someone who's made her position clear and would very much like to end the discussion. "No _way_ Daryl is walking out of here by the end of tonight, and I can't just-"

"Go."

Denise cocks her head, brow furrowed in obvious confusion. "Huh?"

"You heard me. You go with Tara. I can stay. I'll watch him. Unless you think he's gonna need you."

Denise looks doubtful. Beth keeps her expression placid - but with every indication beneath the surface that this isn't an argument she's prepared or willing to have. She's not even positive why she gives a shit, except that all at once she wants everyone as far removed from this - from _him_ \- as possible. There's no peace to be found here, and the presence of people - even Denise - isn't going to bring him any. If he remembers what he did and people are crowded around him, there's no possible way he reacts well. When he wakes up, she wants it to be just her.

Denise has to sense this, because she sighs and it sounds resigned. "Won't be for long."

"Good. Fine." She pauses, thinking. "When's it supposed to start?"

Tara glances at the door. "Three hours or so. People are getting shit together now. I was gonna go help."

"Alright." She doesn't have to do this, what she intends to do now. But she needs to get out, for a short time if nothing else. She doesn't completely understand this impulse either, and something she's deciding is that she doesn't need to understand any of what she's feeling. It might in fact be much better if she doesn't try. "I'm gonna…" She swipes a hand down her face, presses firmly against her eyelids on the way down. Her head is starting to throb behind them. His madness might not be all that's catching. "I'm gonna go home for a bit."

For what?

 _You know._

Denise's expression turns slightly questioning, but she doesn't actually question, which is an inexpressible relief. Beth gazes at her long enough to realize that there isn't much else to say, and she gives Denise and Tara a joint farewell nod as she heads for the door.

She shouldn't do this. She should go back upstairs and be with him until he wakes up, if she's so dead set on doing stupid shit. She should at least minimize the stupidity.

She should do a lot of things. Has been running a hot streak in not doing them, and instead doing exactly what she should not under any circumstances do. It seems like a shame to break it now.

Her eyes fall half closed as she steps into the offensively bright sun. All the way home, she feels like she's sleepwalking.

Not quite the right term either. But it's the best one she can think of.

* * *

She supposes she does intend to shower. Clean clothes - she's not soaked in his blood, but it's on her and it's noticeable. Maybe just topple limply onto her bed and doze again. Stare up at the ceiling. Turn and inhale his smell on the sheets - his sweat and his come, his terror, his insanity. His need.

His love.

Predictably, what she goes for is the blood.

The cuts the glass sliced into her knees were shallow - _superficial_ \- and while they bled through her denim they didn't bleed much. The fact remains, her blood mingled with his on the tile, and as she sinks to her knees for the second time and looks around at the red-brown drying and dried mess, she's filled with a perverse sense of _rightness._ It's right that she should bleed with him this time. It's right that he not be the only one.

There's so fucking much of it, though. Her gaze passes over it all, and even if she left him breathing, she sees this and she thinks he has to be dead. It looks so _bad._ There's no way he could have survived.

Then again, there's no way he could have survived any of what he has.

Rick called himself _stupid._ But Rick forgot how right he might be. Daryl _is_ alive. So far nothing has succeeded in killing him. Not even himself.

She glides her fingers over a tacky streak of blood, darkening from a deeper red. It was black in the last of the moonlight. Now late sun is pouring over it and turning it warm, earthy, like something you might spread around a garden.

Blood meal. They used it in her mother's vegetable garden. Feed the earth with it and things grow.

Somewhere in all of this, her tears are mixed in and drying with the rest.

She remains there on her knees for what feels like forever, staring at all those earthy red-brown stains until they blur away into formlessness. When she finally unfolds herself and tries to find her feet, her legs are numb, and the tingles they send through her when they wake up are violent and almost send her back to the floor with a little cry. Helpless laughter, too. The awakening of a limb hurts her, but it's also always felt surreally like being tickled inside her bones. A weak-stomach feeling, fluttering along the pathways of her nerves.

And also collapsing to the floor and laughing hysterically doesn't seem to her like the most unreasonable idea she's ever had.

She doesn't. When she can walk again, she goes to the kitchen and gets a hand broom and a dustpan. Comes back. Sweeps up the glass with dull, methodical care. Watches the dried blood flake off on the broom's bristles as the shards tumble and glitter and send up fragmentary flashes of her own eyes and mouth - hollow, strained things she doesn't recognize.

She dumps the glass into the bathroom's wastebasket, then sits with her back against the shower stall's sliding door and looks at the blood some more.

At first after they ran from Atlanta, she refused to wash it off. She wanted to wear it. She wanted it where she could see it. The knife and his blood were the only tangible, _real_ things she had left of him. When she finally gave in and let Maggie sponge it off her hands and face, she wept again. She watched as he dissolved into a watery pink and streamed away and was gone.

He streamed away into the ground. He watered the grass and the scattered white heads of clover. Suddenly she recalls that less than a yard away from her right foot, there had been a tiny patch of purple asters.

Pretty things. She tasted vomit and snot and blood, and her own screams, and pretty little things still existed in the world.

They still do. Stubbornly persistent, in spite of everything.

She can't. She can't clean this up. No, he's not dead. It doesn't make any difference. She can't, and she's not going to make herself try.

Slowly, wincing, she gets up and stumbles down the hall to her bedroom.

* * *

She stared at the blood. Now she stares at the bed.

It's exactly as she left it. As _they_ left it. Rumpled, covers half dragged out from under the foot of the mattress, pillows in disarray. She's never left her own bed like this, no matter how restless she's been. This is the kind of bed only two people can make between them, and only doing a very specific thing together.

He fucked her.

Like she wanted him to, he fucked her. But looking at the evidence of it, she realizes that there's no indication of the pain, no sign of the desperation. She avoided the virginal cliche and didn't bleed. Didn't claw his skin open. He didn't bite her, at least not hard enough for that. He didn't rip her throat out, or chop her tongue in half with his teeth. He didn't gut her from the cunt outward.

He fucked her. She fucked him. Something about it is so ludicrous as to nearly be obscene, but she thinks _made love_ and it doesn't fit but it does. They did. That's precisely what they did. They made their own agonized, mutilated species of love, and it was true and real as blood and she would just about die to have it back. Because in the midst of the grief and the fear and the misery, with him inside her she felt _whole_ for the first time since she watched his blood washing away.

And anyway, it wasn't all misery. It wasn't all fear. Him braced over her, almost smiling, holding onto her, whispering that he loved her as he thrust hard into her, and it felt so fucking good. He was so _alive._ He's _capable_ of that. It's in him, the capacity to be with her that way, like he could have been if she wasn't so fucking _stupid_ and hadn't taken the chance away from both of them _,_ and she drops onto the bed and buries her face in the pillows until she stops trembling.

It comes to her after a few moments that she's grieving. Not him, not exactly. But him on the shack's porch and his quiet, raw honesty. The nights after, all his innocent fascination and his wonder. The funeral home and the way he looked at her in the kitchen, his eyes shining in the candlelight. Everything he so clearly wanted to say and couldn't figure out how. The glimpse she got last night. The ghost of it that lingers inside him. All that was.

All that could have been.

At some point she rolls onto her side and gazes - half unfocused - at the window. It has to be getting on to six, and the sun is that deep ruddy gold that's such a fundamental component of a summer afternoon. Once it made her so comfortable, so delightfully lazy, and now she feels nothing for it at all. She should go back soon. There's nothing left for her to do here. She's sure as hell not accomplishing anything lying in the wreckage of _them._

Flash of a memory, brief but so vivid it snatches her breath away: curled here in the first minutes of consciousness, feeling the soreness in her muscles and how it was so weirdly satisfying. The gentle burn between her legs. The wetness.

He wasn't inside her anymore, but he left something behind.

She covers her eyes with one hand and bites down on her lip. She didn't think about that at the time and she's not thinking about it now. She's not. Fuck it, she's _not._

She jerks her body up like she's mad at something and she has a defiant point to make to the world, gets to her feet and scrubs at her face. Takes a deep breath, and another. She's going to go back, and when he wakes up she'll face whatever she finds there inside him. If he thinks it was a mistake and is relieved. If he's sorry. If he's disappointed, sad. If he's wrung out by fresh despair.

If he's enraged.

And she thinks about the loaded gun in the drawer of her bedside table.

It begins at the base of her skull and trickles like ice water down her spinal column, flooding her veins and freezing her in place. It's an option. It is very much an option. To get the gun and go back to him, conceal it and wait until Denise is gone, climb into bed beside him and press the muzzle against his temple and do what he doesn't seem to be able to do. Finish it for him.

Make it stop.

Tears spilling down his cheeks in her dream as he tried to get away from her - tried and was too weak. Should have _wanted_ what she could give him, but he was desperate to stay alive. It was blazing in his eyes. He was begging her not to. Begging her for another chance.

 _I changed my mind. Please. I don't want to. Beth, I love you._

 _I can be all right._

She almost runs out of the room.

* * *

She says no more than a few words to Denise and Tara. Fortunately there isn't a lot to say on either end. No, he shouldn't need anything major, but water when he wakes up. Maybe some juice. Like he just gave blood. Wry little smile. Yeah, makes sense.

They won't say anything about it to anyone. Rick knows, though. Good. He can decide how he wants to handle it. Denise is obviously more than content to not be responsible for that. She's made her feelings about _politics_ abundantly clear.

They won't stay long.

Beth leans back against the examining table and watches them go, and she watches the door for a while after they've closed it behind them.

One of the windows is open, and the evening breeze carries in faint laughter. Equally faint music. Not the smell of cooking meat, not yet, but that'll be coming soon. All the elements of a standard barbecue, so familiar and so badly out of place. They don't belong, and in fact they belong even less than the rest of the Zone. There's something about it reminiscent of an apex, and it serves as a reminder of just how unbelievably _stupid_ she was.

Birthdays, holidays, and summer picnics.

She shuts the window and heads for the stairs.

He's not there.

She gapes at the empty bed in the dimness, uncomprehending, her gaze moving over the blanket thrown back and the body-shaped depression in the mattress and pillow, and the bag of saline hanging somehow forlornly on the IV stand. A calmer part of her is busy pointing out that even if he was still weak, if he woke up he would probably be perfectly capable of getting out of bed and there are all kinds of totally sane reasons why he might want to. He might have been confused, even frightened, and wanted to find someone who can tell him what's happened to him. He might have simply not wanted to wait for someone to come for him. Fuck's sake, maybe he had to take a _piss._

The clothes she left at the foot of the bed are gone. So are the boots.

He's not taking a piss. And he didn't come down the stairs. She didn't hear him moving around or calling. She didn't hear him at all. She didn't hear _anything._

But there is a distinct difference between the quality of empty silence and the quality of silence in which someone is present.

Waiting.

A little over twelve hours ago, the first ringing of her alarm bells was faint before it rose to become deafening. Now they go from silence to full red alert, howling klaxons and her body coursing with fight-or-flight. This is not sane. This is not all right. This is _all fucking wrong,_ and she's whirling and groping for a knife that isn't there when a shadow smoothly detaches itself from the other shadows in the corner of her vision and her skull explodes with light.

It doesn't hurt. Everything is merely falling away from her, or she's the one falling, weightless like in a dream. She blinks up at the receding ceiling - but the last thing she sees, before the light is devoured by darkness, is a hunched figure crouching over her, head spinning into a jittery blur.

It's made of shadow. It's the shadow that's eating the world. As it does, she sees the dull gleam of a rusty grin.

Then nothing anymore.


	39. the lines begin to blur

**Note:** So I just want, from the bottom of my heart, to thank you guys who have been commenting, especially on the last few chapters. I mean, I know a lot of people have a lot of totally legitimate reasons for _not_ commenting and there are lots of different ways to show appreciation, and I'm so grateful to anyone who's come along with me on this nearly 200k word slog of horror and misery, but they really do make me so so happy, even though I always suck at showing my appreciation back. It's repaying time and words and feelings with time and words and feelings, and that means a ton.

And boy there's been a lot of time and words and feelings on this end. Many many feelings. An oncoming train's worth.

❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 39: the lines begin to blur**

 _There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don't like the way the song goes. You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

The pain is what wakes him.

It's more than pain. He has no word for what it is. It barely even _hurts_ in any way he can define; it's a roaring, pounding _force_ in his head, slamming itself against the interior of his skull in time with every beat of his heart. At first all he can do is lie there and _feel_ it, no fucking idea where he is or why he's there, the thin ray of sunlight slipping in through the curtains screaming like a laser across the floor and onto the bed. Once he would have cringed away from it, covered his face, tried to escape. Now he only stares at it, unblinking.

It's impossible that it could make this any worse. If _worse_ even fits.

This is an act of God taking place inside him - a malevolent god manipulating things according to its own sadistic whims. It's a force of nature. It can't be stopped. He can only exist within its eye and watch the wind tear the world apart around him.

Watch the light set the bed on fire. Watch it burn, watch it melt the covers into his skin, blacken and peel back where his flesh is exposed, fat bubbling through raw muscle. Figures encircle him, pointing and shrieking with laughter, crawling out of the gaping holes in the walls. Scratching at the floor and the bedframe with needle claws dripping poison, bloody tongues lolling like dogs. They were gone and he was so scared without them, so lonely, but now they're back and he's not alone, and for the moment he's calm. Relieved.

Burning to endless death and welcoming them.

Those needle claws pick at his memory and he raises his arms, looks down at them. The flames are taking their time with him, _savoring,_ and they haven't yet come that far. He sees the bandages, the needle in his vein and the tube of translucent fluid flowing into him, and he remembers.

And that's when the rage finally erupts and blows his head apart.

She asked him about his anger. He asked her if she knew what a firestorm was. She didn't. He told her. Literally a storm of fire, sweeping through the world and setting the very air alight. Howling winds of flame. The destruction of entire cities. She asked him if his seizures of anger felt like that. He said no.

He said not yet. He said to give him some time.

Time's up.

Still calm. Still burning. All he can see is the fire and all he can hear are the screams, but he sits up, pushes back the covers, pulls the needle out of his arm with a quick hiss. Last time he saw an IV needle. Last time he saw a bag on a stand. How dare she. Bitch, how _dare she_ , _how dare she do that to him,_ how _dare_ she drag him back to that fucking hospital, even only a tiny piece of it, and thrust it into his body like a violation. He's been in the clinic. She stuck needles in him before. It wasn't like this. Those times he wanted it. He _needed_ it. It was kindness he didn't deserve. But _this._

 _He never fucking asked for this._

Closed up all the cuts he made. They weren't good enough to get the job done, he knew that even as he did it, but maybe if they had just given him a chance. Maybe if they had just given him some fucking _time._ Sitting on the edge of the bed in flames, looking down at them.

At what he couldn't do.

Both of them. Fucking cunts. He'll fucking _kill_ the one. Enough screwing around. He doesn't even know what he's been waiting for. He'll rip her apart. Break not only glass coffee tables but every stick of furniture he can find with her head until her head is a pink paste. He'll crush her bones, pull out her nails, yank her teeth out one by one and ram his fist down her throat. He'll kill her with his bare fucking hands.

Then there's _her. Oh._ Oh, there's her. He's going to make that very special.

There are all kinds of things he can do for her.

Fingers on his bare shoulders, caressing his skin away. No flesh on those ruthlessly loving hands, except for stringy rotting bits of it clinging to the blade-sharp bones. Breath in his ear - not hot but _cold,_ cold as wintry death. Smiling approval. Yes, he gets it now. Took him long enough, but what matters is that he _gets it._ Came all this way for her and the problem is that he was _waiting_ for her to make him better, like if he hung around long enough it would happen on its own. No. If it's going to happen, he's going to have to _make_ it happen. He's going to have to force the issue.

Merle silhouetted against the window, the dying light outside. _'bout time, little brother. 'bout time you stopped bein' such a tiny little limp-dicked pussy. You show that bitch._

 _You show her exactly how much you love her._

Voices downstairs, quiet but he can make them out through the screaming. The stupid fat cow is leaving. That's fine; he can take care of her later. In the meantime _she's_ here, and he has her all to himself. He…

Slumps forward and gouges his nails into his scalp, biting the sides of his tongue to keep back his moaning. Sobs flutter in his throat like terrified birds - dry. Always dry. She's down there and he's up here and it's very easy to get to her with adrenaline surging through him, though beneath it he can feel the watery weakness of blood loss. She was there with him. She could have made this all stop. She could even have helped him. She could have saved them both. Holy Christ, why didn't she _understand._

He doesn't want to _be_ like this anymore.

Sooner or later she's going to come up here. She's going to come for him, and it'll be easy to hide in the shadows and wait for her, and it'll be so easy and fucking hell it'll be so _sweet_ to lunge for her and take her down, _hold_ her down, wrench her jeans down her thighs and force her legs apart and hurtle into her like a train, fuck her until she's screaming along with the voices in his head, fuck her bloody and clamp his hand around her throat and squeeze until she stops fighting.

Stops moving at all.

He looks up at the window. Fuck this. Fuck himself, fuck everything. There's glass there. Maybe he can break it and try again, finish it before she can get to him. Do what maybe he should have done before and go for his throat instead of wasting time with his arms. Protect her from himself. His rage is massive, directionless, but he thinks of her and it zeros in on her like a missile targeting system and the flames lick greedily toward her and all he can do is watch.

He can't make it stop. Not anymore.

Oh, sweetheart. Oh, my girl, no. _No_. Please, no. Tearing at his hands with his teeth. Contemplating ripping his stitches out. _No no no_. Never that. She was so _good_ to him, she always has been. What she wanted. What she allowed him to give her. He'll never be able to tell her how much he loves her but if he can somehow _show_ her.

Did already. It didn't take. He thinks once again with mind-numbing terror that it's possible that he doesn't get to die anymore.

That it might not be possible to stop him at all.

When he stands he's nearly certain he'll stagger and go down at the first step he takes, but he doesn't. Maybe it's the adrenaline, maybe it's something else, but the weakness remains submerged beneath the surface and his movement is silent as a shadow. Silent the way he was in the trees, in the dark and the moonlight. Walking. Coming to her. _For_ her.

He hasn't forgotten. Could never forget that. Not now, when he wants to fling both of them into the void yawning under this place.

Waiting to swallow it all.

He finds himself dressed and standing at the open window without meaning to be there, tugging the curtain aside as he peers out. All fire there too, the worst it's ever been, people running down the street and stumbling and falling, writhing as they burn. Laughing. Screaming with laughter as their eyeballs sizzle and burst. Little children hold hands and dance around a skinned cat spitted on a stake. A woman is feeding her crying baby to the flames, gnawing at its charred flesh. Lying on his back in the smoldering grass, a naked man unrecognizable with blisters slits his own throat. Two people - impossible to tell age or sex or anything about them as their flesh sloughs off - fuck like dogs in the fire, one biting viciously into the throat of the other. The sky is pitch black, and not just with smoke. The only light is the burning.

Over the walls, out on the desert plain, vast herds of the dead are rolling toward them like tsunami. Unstoppable. Perfectly belonging.

 _Beth._

 _I'm in Hell._

He squeezes his eyes shut and jams his knuckles against his bared teeth.

And the screams and the laughter and the roar of the fires subside, and he hears music. Voices talking, laughing - not mad laughter but cheerful. He opens his eyes and yes, there's smoke, but in the distance it's clear that the source is a fucking _grill,_ and there are people standing around and he catches a glimpse of what looks like a _red balloon._

They're having a barbecue. They're standing in the midst of Hell with the dead converging on them, and they're having a motherfucking _barbecue._

He gapes at it. Because he can see the other. Both, now. The happy people in the fire, surrounded by demons and by ruined versions of themselves, and maybe it's not real but it's _real._ It always has been. They don't see it. Even now, even after the ones who _do_ belong swept in like a wind and tried to destroy them, they still don't see it. How close death is. How little it would take.

Rick, there. Would know him at any distance. Rick and the Baby in his arms. The Baby who will be lucky to last another year.

His hand is so tight on the curtain that he hears it tear. _Judith. Her name is Judith._ He went on a run. He wasn't losing anyone else. Came back. Fed her. Held her.

Belonged.

He's tearing himself apart from the inside out. His head is beating itself to death. It's excruciating. He wants to curl up on the floor and scream his throat raw. This is not sustainable. He can't contain this. _Trying_ and _not trying_ and he could help them but he wants to _kill them all_ and fix and shatter and he wants to cradle Judith in his arms and break the Baby's neck and he wants to tell Rick he's sorry and call him _brother_ and rip Rick's fucking throat out with his teeth.

And he wants to touch _her_ and tell her he loves her until he has no voice left and do _anything_ for her, and he wants to fuck her to death and use her corpse as his plaything.

And he wants to gather her to him and carry her into the dark, carefully close the lid over them both and rest with her at last.

How it was supposed to be.

He's shivering, whimpering. He realizes it in time to stop himself. No sound from downstairs but she's there and she'll come. He can't let this happen. He still has some control. The firestorm hasn't totally consumed him - and it hasn't totally consumed _them._ They're almost out of time, but the idea crashes into his head like a dropped brick: they're all together in one place now, a collective audience, and maybe if someone could _warn_ them about what's all around them and what's coming for them, make them _see._

Pointless. Pathetic to boot. He's a joke. They wouldn't see. They'd laugh at him. Call him crazy, twirl their fingers next to their temples and roll their eyes. They're laughing already; all their little _party_ is missing is the entertainment.

And anyway, he doesn't get to save people anymore.

But he has nothing left. He has nothing to lose. He's out of his own time. He can't stay. If he stays, he'll hurt someone. If he stays, he'll do more than _hurt her._ And he can't stay because he can't _do this anymore,_ he can't keep pretending, and every fucking second of every fucking day it hurts so fucking bad.

If he stays, it never stops. Until this place and everyone in it dies.

He already told her he didn't want to be here when that happens. Doesn't want to have to watch.

He's wild. Flailing. Inside him is a tornado of desperate, panicked bewilderment. He whirls; creak on the stairs. Her. _Oh God, her._ She'll try to stop him, whatever he means to do now, and he'll…

 _No_.

Calm again. Everything is burning and dying but he can be calm. He can be all right. He can sink back into the shadows of the dim room, pull them around himself, and wait for her.

He's not going to hurt her. He's not going to let her stop him. He's not going to let her do anything. He's going to keep her safe. He's going to send her into the dark, where nothing can harm her.

And once he's satisfied himself that she's all right, he's going to go and do what he has to do. Whatever happens after that, well, it happens.

Never could have gone any other way.

* * *

But she's so beautiful when he sends her down. Fragment of an image of how it was supposed to be. She's perfect. And he'll take care of her.

He'll do everything.

* * *

He's aware that every step away from her he takes is dismantling him.

Leaving her. Arranging her with all the care he would have used to carry her. Making sure she's comfortable. Tender. Soft. So much love for her. He has that still. It's inside him. It hasn't burned.

But the rest of him is. He's falling apart. Decaying. Walking like _them,_ shambling, guts hanging in a tangle and fingerbones exposed and face peeling off starting at the gaping hole in his head. Stumbling down the street toward the music and the laughing, all discordant, all so near screams already. Pain. This Hell of a world making up for all that lost time. They don't know. They will. Only question is how soon.

For some reason he's now fixated on the vaguely realized idea that he can try.

Or maybe they'll just kill him.

Christ, that would be great. At least someone will.

Maybe he's trying to make that happen.

Rick and the Baby. It's twisting his lungs out of his chest, dragging them through his ribs. He can't get his breath - knotting up like he's crying, only he's not, because he can't anymore. Can't bear to watch Beth die. Can't bear to watch _Judith_ die either. Tiny precious life, all he could think about was saving her and with something so basic as food, because what new life needs is to be protected and to be fed and with fierce certainty he knew he could do both of those things if he could be good for nothing else.

Can't do those things anymore. But if he can finally make Rick understand, maybe Rick can. So much of his most vicious hatred is reserved for Rick, for the thought of pinning Rick to the ground and paying him back in lengthy spades for all the _shit_ Rick has put him through, but maybe Rick can find a way. If they run. If.

The world lurches and he almost goes sprawling. Catches himself on a suddenly present tree trunk, leans and gasps and shakes all over. Retches but there's nothing in his stomach but bile. His head is made of hot cement and he can't hold it up anymore.

Has to.

He ran for her. He ran all night. He ran until he collapsed with his heart a crushed fist in his chest and his lungs full of acid. It wasn't enough. He's never enough. He tried and he tries and it's never ever enough. He's nothing. Worse than. The hissing monsters serving as his hideous escort confirm that.

Only thing he ever did that was worth a shit in the end was dying for her.

Pavement bubbling and ground crumbling under his feet. Infernal pit below. They're all going to fall. Overrun by the dead, consumed by the fires above, in the end they'll fall, shrieking terror, and he'll have to _watch_ and he can't, not when maybe he could have done something. Pointless, useless, but he has to anyway. Otherwise it wasn't worth anything after all. None of it was ever worth anything.

 _Love, I'm so sorry. We were. It was._

 _It could have been._

It's insane but then again _he's_ insane, and he's walking again. It should be impossible. He should have nothing left. But just like every step away from her was tearing him apart, every step toward this equally insane _party_ is flooding his veins with chemicals that coalesce into angry bees inside his skull, stinging venom into his blood. It tastes like bitter iron and old sweat, sickly-sweet, a mouth full of rotten flesh.

There's a reason why he made it six hundred miles when he should have died before he ever took the first step.

(In the most academic way possible, he knows that he's strong. It stands to reason. He survived the constant torture - varying in degrees of severity but always present - of his childhood, the senseless death of the one parent who was ever genuinely kind to him, the loss of the brother who occasionally did attempt to protect him but ultimately left him behind. He survived the long years of aimless misery that came after - misery so ubiquitous that he only grasped it once he was no longer feeling it. He survived the actual literal end of the world. He survived losing his brother again, and then again, and in a worse fashion than he thought was possible. He survived losing so many people. He survived losing everyone. He survived losing her. He survived a bullet to the head. He survived a journey that would have killed most other people a dozen times over, and he did so completely alone and completely insane. He has survived two blatant - albeit badly mismanaged - attempts to kill himself, and probably many more that were far less blatant, of which he was only half aware at best. He has to be strong, because there is simply no other way to explain his wholly reliable survival. No one is that lucky. Or rather, no one is that _un_ lucky.)

(He knows that he's strong. He knows that this is not a positive attribute. His strength is terrible, a curse, and it's inextricably bound up with his equally terrible weakness. He is not a good person; nor is he a bad person. He is a sick person, a _weak_ person, and one more thing he knows - beneath his mad, miserable rage - is that for all his hatred of the people who won't let him die, the only person who truly deserves any of his hatred is himself.)

(Fortunately he does hate himself. His hatred for himself dwarfs his hatred of anyone else. His hatred for himself is all-consuming. It is not confused. It is not mingled with love, or even the most cautious affection. He hates his mutilated body. He hates his diseased mind. He hates his disgusting worm-eaten heart.)

(He perceives all of this clearly even now, like a red beacon in the darkness. It guides him.)

(He senses that one way or the other, he won't have to follow it for very much longer.)

He's close enough to see everything. He didn't know there were this many people. As many people as there ever were at the prison. Maybe more. All like he's seen. Sleek and slow, completely off their guard. No one even seems to have noticed him yet and that alone is inexcusable. It's dusk, and someone has found and lit some of those ridiculous torches that people sometimes have at these things. There are a couple of tables loaded down with food. Soda. Some liquor he can't identify. There's a grill. There are balloons. There are children running and laughing in the background, one younger boy trying to catch fireflies. Music - some awful upbeat Top 40 pop song that was big right before Top 40 pop songs went the way of the dinosaur. Chatter.

Faces. Names. _Rick Carol Judith Carl Michonne Sasha Tara Abraham Rosita Eugene Gabriel._

 _Eric. Aaron. Denise._

No _Maggie_ or _Glenn._ They're gone. Yes.

No _Tyreese_ or _Noah._ They're dead. Yes.

No _Beth._ He put her somewhere safe.

Yes.

These were his people. This was his family. He knows it. He knows it with everything in him, with his flesh and his blood and his bones and his ruined brain. He used to love them. They used to love him. He used to be with them. He used to be happy. He used to be all right.

He used to belong.

Now he stands here eternally outside of it all, and except for the grill and the torches there is no fire and there is no yawning infernal pit and there are no grinning demons. There never were. There never was any of it. There's only the living and the dead.

And him.

Everything goes red.

* * *

She's in the dark, and she's in bed.

She's also fully clothed, and it's not her bed, and her head is fucking killing her.

She tries to sit up, groans as nausea churns through her and rolls onto her side and devotes all her energy and attention toward the task of not vomiting all over herself. The distribution of blood in her brain shifts and everything hurts even more, lights flashing at the corners of her eyes like tiny strobes. She doesn't. She doesn't remember. There's something to _remember_ and she doesn't, and if she could remember it she would understand why all of this is the way it is, why this bed and these clothes and this pain in her head, and why she's suddenly so scared. Why everything is so _wrong_.

It's dark but the curtains in the half open window are drawn aside and there's faint light coming in. The lamps and reddish glow like firelight. It catches and glances off of the hanging bag of clear fluid beside her, the tube dangling from it.

IV drip. She stares at it, baffled. Why would she need-

 _Oh._

And abruptly, through the window, there are screams.

Fuck the pain. She's suffered far worse than this. Another breath and she's on her feet, staggering toward the door, desperately finding her equilibrium as she goes. Groping at the back of her head as she starts unsteadily down the darkened stairs, and her fingers come away sticky, and she doesn't know everything but she knows enough.

He was waiting for her in the shadows. He hit her, knocked her unconscious.

Then he laid her in bed. And as far as she can tell, he didn't hurt her at all otherwise.

 _If he was really trying to kill you, you'd be dead right now._

No. She's panting as she shoves the door open and stumbles out into the warm night, the world still spinning around her, but she's finding the power of sheer fight-or-flight and she's starting to run in earnest, boots thudding on the pavement and all the way up into her throbbing skull. No, he wasn't trying to kill her. He wasn't trying to do that at all.

He was trying to do the exact opposite.

More screaming. But it doesn't sound pained or panicked, and there isn't much of it. It's not really screaming at all; it's _yelling._ It sounds surprised. Angry. She can't make out any words, and the dim shapes moving in the distance are all unclear in her hazy vision. But going by tone, some people are upset and other people are trying to calm things down. Familiar tones, the latter. Familiar voices.

Carol. Michonne. Denise.

Rick.

She doesn't know what's happened. But she thinks she knows enough. If he had hurt someone, at least seriously, this would sound very different. He did something else. He knocked her out, yes, but except for that he wasn't trying to hurt her.

Maybe he hasn't been trying to hurt anyone.

She almost falls when she reaches them. Her chemistry abandons her at the last moment and a thick wave of dizziness overwhelms her, and as everything briefly melts into a fiery indistinctness, she feels Rick's arm around her, holding her up.

"Beth?" Carol. Beth lifts her head, rubs one-handed at her eyes, focuses enough to verify identification. Carol is pushing her hair away from her face, peering. Probably searching for obvious damage. "God, Beth, are you alright? What _happened?_ "

"What happened here?" She's doing some peering of her own, scanning around the assembled crowd and the trappings of the party that's obviously been unpleasantly disrupted. No one seems to be hurt, not that she can see, but food has been swept off tables, bowls of chips broken and scattered across the pavement, something that looks to have been chocolate pudding. Grill on its side. Burgers - venison, she remembers with bizarre vividness, a recent experiment that worked out pretty well - lying forlorn on the ground. A couple of torches have been knocked over, and one appears to have set fire to the grass, but Enid is angrily stomping it out as Carl picks it up.

His destruction. His wreckage. There's something so horribly pathetic about it. Something so _sad._

"Daryl," Rick says tightly. He releases her when she shrugs him off, but he keeps his hand on her shoulder and she allows it. "He was confused, he thought-"

"He was _out of his fucking mind!_ " Bruce, red-faced and furious, looking up in the midst of trying to get the grill upright without burning his hands. "Started tearing everything up, screaming some bullshit about how we don't belong here and we're all gonna die."

"Speaking in a purely technical sense, he wasn't incorrect-" Helpful input from Eugene, and a glance from Tara fortunately stops him there.

Deanna steps forward between Abraham and Rosita, arms crossed over her chest, face pinched. Angry too, but cold. And disappointed. "He was completely out of control is what he was. Rick, I _told_ you-"

"I told _you._ " Low, icy to beat Deanna's coldness. Dangerous. Ignoring Michonne's warning hand on his arm. "You don't tell me what to do with my people. You don't get to decide that. That is _not your call._ "

"And you don't get final veto on what is and isn't a threat to this community. Rick, I understand that he's one of yours, I understand what it means that he's here after everything, but-"

"You don't. You don't have any fucking _idea._ "

"Rick." Michonne's hand isn't just on his arm. It's gripping hard, her knuckles pale. "You need to step back."

"Where did he go?" Beth is whispering, half lost under Michonne's quiet steel, and she's certain no one heard her, but Carol gestures into the dark.

"He ran off that way. Right before you got here. I tried to stop him but he pulled away from me. Beth, his _arms,_ what-"

"Later." And she's pulling away too, turning into the night.

This is stupid. This is far beyond stupid, even for her, even in a long line of stupid things she's done where Daryl Dixon is concerned. But that sense of inevitability persists, and with it the sense that she is no longer, strictly speaking, in control of any of this. If she ever was to begin with.

And she's still virtually certain that anyone else is just going to make this worse than it already is.

Carol is calling for her to come back, more exasperated than alarmed, though there's a healthy dose of that, and Denise is adding her voice to the fray, almost as angry as Rick is, and joined halfway through by an equally angry Aaron - _he didn't mean to hurt anyone - hell, he_ didn't _hurt anyone_ \- but it's all receding as the shadows eat her up. After a few seconds she realizes she's ducking into them on purpose. She doesn't want to be pursued, though she doesn't think anyone immediately will.

Anyway, if they go back to the house to look for him, she doesn't think they'll have much luck. He hasn't gone back there. If he was trying to do what she's sure he was trying to do, he never would. It won't be a place of refuge to him, to the extent that it ever was. Horror is there in his room, misery and torment, and if he's _trying,_ what's waiting for him there is going to punish him for it.

Force him to punish himself.

She understands now, what he's fighting. She understands better than she ever did before. How strong it is, how much it hates him, how much it wants to make him hurt. He told her, more than once he told her, but she didn't _get it._

And he's not possessed. It's not something from outside, something that can be exorcised. It's _him_. It's him in every way that matters.

There's no escaping what that means.

He won't be at his own house. No way he'll be at hers. He won't have gone back to the clinic. There's really only one other place he could be. And she has no idea what she'll find there.

But she has to try.


	40. so much hate for the ones we love

**Note:** Okay, a couple things.

While many of the details of this approaching ending were left alone to develop naturally as the story and characters developed, there were very particular things I wanted to do and/or knew were going to happen, in some cases down to the pacing and dialogue of specific scenes (usually driven/inspired by specific pieces of music).

(Sidebar: That was extremely true of I'll Be Yours For a Song and Safe Up Here With You, which is why my playlists for IBYFAS and SUHWY function as literal soundtracks/"film" scores. When I finally post my mix for this fic, the same will be true of it, perhaps more than either of those others. EWiB could almost be a musical in some ways.)

What follows here was decided on very early. And it made and makes me very, very nervous, because it's something I've wanted to write for a long time, not because it's fun - oh my _God_ it is not fun - but because I wanted to see if I could make it work.

I think I have. But I may not have. It's entirely possible that I've fucked it up in the worst way. If I have, I'm sincerely sorry. And if you have trigger issues with major, _major_ consent problems/non-con, you may want to stop here or skim.

I also want to reiterate that this fic is problematic as fuck, and it's not my intention at all - nor do I believe it for second - to suggest that people with Traumatic Brain Injuries necessarily do these things or become this way. Seriously.

Okay. Sigh. Here we go. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 40: so much hate for the ones we love**

 _Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

Aaron's garage door is open and the light is on, and it's not like she needs any confirmation that she was right, but there it is.

She skids to a halt, leaning over her knees and gasping. She's still dizzy and probably concussed; she has no idea how she's running. He's lost a significant amount of blood even if he didn't need a full transfusion; she has no idea how he was running either.

So they have some things in common.

Something rattles inside, metallic. She can't see very far in at this angle, and there's no visual on him, so he has to be further inside. The bike. It's totally possible that he's got it running, and she can follow that particular train of thought without any problem - and believes without any difficulty that he's capable of keeping that particular train on its tracks - but even if he hasn't…

This is his only other place. The only other place he might feel at all safe. The only other place that is at all _his._

"Daryl?"

Because she is _not_ sneaking up on him. Maybe he doesn't want to kill her, but that would be a great way to get him to do it anyway.

Pause in the rattling. The interior of the garage comes into full view - not very different from when she last saw it, except for a vaguely increased sense of overall chaos - and him with it, just as he turns.

He's standing in front of a shelf near the back wall, clearly in mid-rummage through a toolbox. His shoulders are hunched. His hair is wild. His eyes are just as wild, huge and dark. He's so pale and his hands are bloody, and his forearms are spotted with more blood seeping through the bandages and smeared across his exposed skin from where he's torn the cuts open.

He's shaking. He's terrified.

 _They_ were scared of him, at least somewhat, when he was probably as scared of them as he ever has been of anything. And not just scared _of_ them. Not now.

Scared _for_ them.

He whispers her name, and except for his trembling he doesn't move.

She takes a slow step forward and then another and another, one hand held out and spread like she's trying to soothe a hurt and frightened animal. She's calmed badly spooked horses before - things several times her size that could kill her with ease. They didn't want to hurt her either. And they didn't.

Maybe in the end that's what matters most.

"It's alright," she murmurs. "Daryl… It's alright, you're okay."

He shakes his head, presses himself back against the shelf. His hand is still in the box.

Something about that makes her suddenly and violently uneasy.

"You're alright," he breathes. It's not a question, but he sounds uncertain, as if he's not sure he can credit what he's seeing. As if he's not sure he can credit anything. He can't. He doesn't know what really happens anymore. Nothing might be real. Everything might be.

Christ, what does he think he _did_ to her?

"Yeah." Soft. She's stopped where she is, close - no more than two yards away from him. "I'm alright."

He's silent for a few seconds, breathing rapid and as shaky as his muscles. He's not blinking very much. At this distance she can see that his eyes are unfocused. Wobbling. He's there, yes. But only barely. Clinging by his fingernails. And his fingernails are splintering.

If this is a war of attrition with himself, he's got almost nothing left.

He drags in a deeper breath, licks at his lips - and they look just as dry when he's done. "Did I hurt anyone?"

 _Oh, God._ "No. No, everyone's fine." Another step. It's not an _as if_ situation; she literally has a wounded feral beast backed into a corner. He doesn't want to hurt anyone, okay, but if she loses sight of how dangerous he is, she's even stupider than she thought. "Everything's okay. Daryl, can you come back to the clinic with me?"

He shakes his head again. Immediate, no interest in discussion. No debate. "No."

She reaches for him, not quite touching him, and at least he doesn't shy away. "Please? Denise can-"

"I ain't never goin' back there." He swallows. The click of his throat is very loud. "I can't stay here. Told you, I don't belong. I never will." The hand in the box withdraws itself, and she sees the gun he's holding a split second before her entire body locks up.

 _How._

It doesn't matter how.

"Daryl," she whispers, bloodless. And she has no idea what to follow that up with.

"I don't belong here," he repeats, and she feels very little comfort when he lowers the gun to his side instead of pointing it at her. At himself. There are a lot of things he could be intending to do with it. Murder-suicide - or murder or suicide in isolation - are only a couple of them. But none of them are good. "You don't either." And oh, _oh_ , oh _shit,_ all at once she knows where this is going, as he extends his own quivering hand to her. "Come with me."

She doesn't stop to consider what a denial might do to him now. Do to her. It just happens. "I can't."

"You _can._ " He was scared, sad, pleading. Now there's a desperate edge, and it's harder, and he's not pressed so firmly against the shelf. No backed so deeply into that corner. And this might be worse. "What the fuck is keepin' you here? It's _bullshit,_ you _know that._ "

It occurs to her that this might be among the most lucid moments he's had since he arrived.

"Everyone's here." She hauls in a breath. It feels far too much like she's reminding herself. "Maggie. Glenn, Rick, Judith, Carl and Carol and Michonne, all the others, they're-"

"Who the _fuck are they?_ " Not a whisper. Not a murmur. A bare-toothed _snarl,_ and she watches the fury bleed into his eyes, darken them to pitch, and she can't stop her own eyes from darting to the gun. She _is_ afraid of him, no matter how many times she tells herself not to be, and he'll be able to tell. And she can't help it. "You see them? At that fuckin' _luau,_ laughin' it up? Those fuckin' _balloons?_ "

He's enraged.

He's not wrong to be.

"I know," she says softly, but he's running over her, his voice rising..

"They don't _get it._ You _said._ Right before you stabbed that bitch with the fuckin' scissors, you said. You said _I get it now._ The fuck did you _get? Huh?_ "

She doesn't remember now. She didn't even remember she said that at all.

"They don't get it. You do. You don't belong here." He takes a quick step toward her, and incredibly, _insanely,_ he's sliding the gun under his belt, at his back. He's putting it away. "We made it out there before, just us, we can do it again. It'll be how it was supposed to be. _Beth._ I _love_ you _._ Let's _go._ "

He halts and stares down at her and she stares back, shivering, and it's _him_.

It's not. But it is. Still enraged, still dark, but none of the rage is directed at her. The ghost of him is standing in front of her, more corporeal than she's ever seen since he became one. He means it. He means every word. In this moment, he doesn't want to kill her, and he doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to kill everyone else, destroy everything - or if he does, it's not a desire he cares to indulge. He loves her. He wants to run with her. He wants to _go._

And he's right. She doesn't belong. In this place, she never has.

It's resting on her tongue, beating itself against the inside of her teeth. Eager. _Desperate._ Like it's been there all along, waiting, and all it needed was him to ask.

 _Yes._

But something else is moving behind his eyes.

Like flowing ink. Nearly impossible to make out. But she knows what she's looking for, and she sees it. It crawls through the poisonous depths of him, its razor teeth flashing and claws clicking, trailing the stench of blood and fear, and it's hungry. It bears a particular appetite for her. She'll be too tempting to resist for very long, if it even wanted to.

And he has almost nothing left to fight with, and that thing waiting in his shadows will make him pay for every second he tries.

This is what he's truly asking her, without knowing it. Out there, _just them_. Just them together in the dark. Not how it was supposed to be. How it would _really_ be. Everything he's capable of, everything he's done and might do, and the sentient nightmare that would flood out of him with no walls to contain it. And she's strong but he's stronger, and she's fast but he's faster, and he knows the night like she never could and never will and never, ever wants to.

Her blood ices over and _yes_ withers between her lips.

" _No,_ " she whispers, and she watches helplessly as he sinks away and Hell washes in to replace the space he left.

He seems to _swell._ He looms over her with height she would swear he didn't have seconds ago. His jaw clenches so hard his head jitters, his dark eyes snap narrow, and all his rage swings around and comes to bear on her like the heads of a hundred bolts. She has time to take a step away before he seizes her shoulders and, with more power than she would have believed him to possess right now, spins her and slams her back against the wall.

He didn't want to hurt her. Well. It was nice while it lasted.

Because she looks into his crazed eyes and a _lust_ to hurt her is the only thing she sees.

"Yeah, you get it." It finally occurs to her to struggle but then he has one hand on her wrist and the other on her throat, and the former is twisting and both are squeezing like a vise. "You fuckin' _whore,_ you get it. But you don't." His entire body is pinning her, so much more strength than he should be able to summon, and she should be _fighting him_ and she's not. Not like she could be. Fuck's sake, she still has one hand free, and even with him so close to choking her, to breaking her wrist, she should not just be _taking this._

But she is.

He's right. She doesn't get it.

Then his hold on her throat is gone and as she claws in a ragged breath and starts to duck out under his arm she allows herself a couple of idiotic seconds to hope, but he kills that with both wrists suddenly slapped over her head, clamped one-handed so hard her bones grind, breathing hot against her ear-

And he rolls his hips and she feels him.

"You don't get it. But you're gonna. Gonna show you, fuckin' _show_ you how you want it."

She can't think at all.

 _Gorman,_ there's that, of _course_ he's there at the core of this like the taste of stale vomit, every cell in her skin trying to claw its way off her body as her stomach bucks with nausea and her muscles dissolve into shameful quivering. But it's worse than that, it's a hundred thousand fucking times worse, because it's him, it's _him,_ this good man who literally died to protect her, and all his innocent fascination and his childlike wonder and his sweetness and his love, and this is what they become when a bullet crashes into them and spatters them all over the wall. The floor.

Her.

This is what happens when he loses the war.

She struggles again but she's bloodless and drained and it's feeble, her eyes burning blind with tears - and at least she doesn't have to see this _monster_ wearing his face, at least there's that - and she feels the top of his thigh pressing up between her legs, and his belt buckle clinks and his teeth graze her ear.

These details, boring into her as if her mind believes she'll want to remember. The scrape of his teeth and the prickle of the scruff on his jaw. The crack of the bones in her wrist. His heavy breathing and the dry roughness of his lips, how she felt those lips on her skin before and how good it was and how he's now turning that good pleasure into infected waste. Sound of his zipper. Hard cock against her hip through the layers of clothing still between them and it's like acid eating through her and she can't get away. Last night and how bad she _wanted_ that cock inside her. The humiliation of the whimper that slips out of her, the lurch of the world as time dilates, and even though she can't see him clearly through her tears, she watches him poised to defile every touch and kiss and _I love you_. The hot smell of him, blood and sour sweat and the stench of madness, and something far worse, something for which she has no name at all.

She actually thought maybe she didn't believe in real evil anymore.

"Nah, keep fightin'." Fingers at her fly, pulling it open. "I like watchin' you fight."

What she knows, above the horror and the terror and the pain lancing down from her wrists all through her in advance of the worse pain that's coming: if he does this, it's over. If he does this, neither of them has any choice left. If he does this, if she survives it, he won't. He simply won't. He won't let himself live. He won't be _able_ to live. He'll stop _trying to try._ He'll stop _trying._ He'll just do it.

Or she'll have to do it for him.

 _Keep fightin'._ Didn't he tell her something like that before? Ask her? Something gentler, sweeter, destroyed now? When all he wanted was to lie in a dead man's bed and listen to her sing.

She doesn't sing anymore. She fights.

So.

She never saw it. She only heard the very rough basics from Michonne. But Carl told her more, once when he was feeling unusually confessional. Once in the middle of a sleepless night, she told him about Gorman - she doesn't recall exactly why - and, haltingly, he told her his own story. His own terror. What happened to him. What _almost_ happened.

What Rick did.

He has her wrists. But he doesn't have her throat anymore. And as he forces his thick fingers into her jeans and pants into her ear, she lunges forward and sinks her teeth into the side of his neck.

He howls and and flings her away from him - sending her sprawling to the concrete and cracking her hip against the edge of a worktable leg - at the same instant he jerks backward, swiping at her absence with unexpected clumsiness, other hand flying to his neck as he gapes at her with his teeth peeled back from his lips like a dog. He's as stunned as he is freshly angry, eyes wide, blood trickling from between his fingers. She can taste it copper-sweet in her mouth.

His blood. Again.

She has no time to suffer the full obscenity of it. She scrambles backward, eyes darting around for any weapon she can reach. He's groping at his back, going for the gun, once more snarling.

" _Cunt,_ you dirty little cunt, you fuckin'- You-"

She watched his dark rage roar in like a storm. Now she watches it go just as fast as it came. And the clarity dawning in his eyes is the most horrible thing she's seen since those eyes closed - she believed - forever.

His hands fall loose and open and he stumbles back, staring down at the blood smearing his fingers and then at her, face twisting into appalled, horrified revelation, a sob bubbling up in his throat. Something that might be her name. Head shaking as shudders ripple through him. _No. No._ Mouthing it over and over, like the only thing he can say. _Nonono._

She's pushing herself up to her knees. The world around her has gone flat, and even with the throbbing in her neck and wrist and hip, within it she feels like one huge numb limb. Once again, she underestimated how bad this can get. It would be better, for him, if he had simply tried to kill her.

Better for both of them.

" _Daryl_."

But when she reaches for him this time he _does_ shy away, cringes like she's winding up to hit him, cowering before her even though she's on her knees and he's still on his feet. Still mouthing silent _no,_ one hand rising to yank cruelly at his hair, blood running freely from the bite on his neck.

"Daryl… Daryl, it's _okay_."

It's not. It's not okay. It'll probably never be okay again. It's entirely possible that it doesn't matter that he _didn't._ Not to him. _Tried_ will be more than enough.

He doesn't get to come back. Not from this.

" _No._ " And he's drawing the gun and tearing past her, tripping over the edge of the tarp, almost tumbling, keeping his feet and plunging into the darkness.

She remains on her knees and, as helpless and useless as when she watched him die, she watches him go.

* * *

Like before, she knows where he's going. Where he's gone. Roughly. Well enough to move. Because like before, she's making the stupidest decision she possibly could, and she's making it because really she has no choice. He hasn't given her one. It can only be her. Her wrists groaning with every movement as she makes her way back to her house at a limping trot - her head pounding even harder now, sure she'll have bruises on her throat tomorrow - she knows that if she had any fucking sense at all she would just let him go.

He was right. He can't stay. He doesn't belong.

But he doesn't belong out there either. No more than he does in here. He doesn't belong anywhere. The only thing waiting for him out there is more suffering, and out there he'll be alone in it, because whatever kept him alive this long has done everything short of beating him down to nothing, and it'll hurt him over and over but it won't let him die.

She can't leave him. Not again.

She promised.

As she pushes her front door open, she hears faint, raised voices in the distance, working on the same level as they were when she left them. Not that much time has passed and they're still arguing. Good. Then they may not have caught him. May not have noticed him, gone after him.

May not notice her.

Down the hall to her bedroom in the dark. Bedside drawer open in the dark. Little flashlight cool in the dark as she slips it into her pocket. Gun heavy in her hand in the dark, smooth and comforting in the worst possible sense. She stands for a moment, holding it, head tilted back as she breathes and imagines that she's standing in a pocket of time doubled back on itself, and if she wished she could watch them making love together in that bed, watch them _fucking,_ the only version of that she's willing to accept. She listens to the silence of no one present. The silence of emptiness.

The dark wind of her future.

 _Are you really going to do this? After everything?_

She doesn't know.

But whatever she ends up doing, it couldn't have gone any other way.

* * *

Yes, the party was ridiculous. But they're not such fools as to leave the walls completely unwatched. There are a few people dotting the platforms all along the top, and as she jogs up to the gates, she lifts her head and sees Mark standing in her customary place - newish guy, he of the scavenged balloons - and Mark looks back down at her, and he's noticeably rattled.

Like she thought.

"I need to go out."

He glances around nervously. He's actually not far from a kid, not much older than she is and a lot less hardened, blond cowlick falling in his eyes and deep gold in the weird, low light from the distant party and the closer lamps. "Uh… Why?"

"You don't need to know. I'm goin'."

"Is it about him?"

"Who?" Like she doesn't know. Like she doesn't know every second of this scenario.

"Crazy guy, came through here, didn't tell me why he was leaving either. _And_ he was waving a gun around." Mark clears his throat, glances down at the rifle in his hands. "Hey, isn't he one of yours?"

"Yeah. I'm goin' after him." She steps forward and starts working at the big latch, dragging grinding clanks out of the bars as she hauls them back. She moves without questioning herself and without internal turmoil. There's a lot of freedom in giving up, giving in, allowing whatever happens to happen. Not fighting anymore. "Don't tell anyone."

She glances up again and he's blinking down at her.

"Or what?"

Not challenging her. Probably doesn't even mean to ask it like that. He's genuinely confused. So she gives him a grim smile as she slides through the gap in the gate. Poor kid. But Daryl cut her so deep and she bled so much, and she lost a lot of her sympathy in the process. In a way she can't identify as good or bad, she feels hollow.

"Or I fuckin' kill you."

She can feel his wide-eyed stare on her back as she runs into the dark.

* * *

He taught her how to track. Or he planted the seed; after he was gone it was a skill she cultivated. Learned it the way she knew he would have wanted her to. Taught a lot of it to herself, based on the foundation he gave her; hunt after hunt, learning how to read the landscape like a guidebook, how to look at the world around her and know what she was seeing, how to identify and catalog every tiny and seemingly insignificant detail. How to _pay attention._

She got good. Probably not as good as he was - pretty much _definitely_ not as good - but good. She liked to believe he would have been proud of her.

When she could bear to think about why she was doing it at all.

She taught herself how to do it in the daylight - at all times of the day, at all angles of the sun. But she also taught herself the night, at least a bit, and now, as she steps off the road and in among the dense pines, flashlight beam bobbing ahead of her, it's not difficult at all, because he's doing nothing to hide his spoor, deep prints of his boots and violently scattered leaves, bent branches of shrubs, churned earth and pine needles.

He had to know he would be followed. Or that someone would try. Maybe he assumed that specific someone wouldn't be a tracker of any significance.

Maybe he simply wants to be found.

The moon is rising, sharp and pale, and she's able to lower the flashlight and hide the beam most of the time. Which is good, because given enough time it will draw walkers, and while they're not _that_ much of a worry anymore, it's still something she doesn't need.

It's a _distraction_ she doesn't need.

Gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, pressed together when she raises them. Lowered, only the moon to see by, she imagines - against her will, so _many_ things are contrary to what she wills - him walking through the night, following her trail ever-northward, relentless, driven by a thing she finally sees for what it is. Obsession, insatiable. Love warped and mutilated into something far more like hatred. A furiously burning desire that rends and consumes and devours.

Except not only that. That was never all there was.

It's beautiful out here. She pauses and stands, tilts her head back like she did in her bedroom and listens. This is not empty silence. It's silence full of presence, of _life_. Rustling of leaves, dead and alive, hiss of breeze through the pines, crackle of sticks under her feet, the whirring duet of crickets and cicadas. A single mockingbird, singing some distance away. Something so lonely about it, about it sending its song into the moonlit dark. There's a little creek somewhere nearby. It murmurs and babbles, and now and then it laughs. It muses on its own secrets.

Grating moan of the dead, but it sounds like only one, and not close. She disregards it.

It's beautiful out here, and she's reconsidering.

Like, if she did go back. Left him to his madness and to himself, and to the potential of his survival in this beauty, however remote and however torturous it might be. Did what he wants - what he _believes_ he wants - and left him alone. If she returned to her own life and finally began to rebuild it. If she accepted that not everything is her fault and she can't change the past, and at last she mourned him and what was and what could have been, and now never will be.

If she let him go.

It might be better. Better than the gun. Better than all the other ways this could end. Better for her.

Possibly him.

She's thinking about it. She's thinking carefully, without precisely meaning to. It's yet another stupid thing to let herself become so distracted, and perhaps it's appropriate that it's this thing that genuinely threatens her life in a way nothing else has.

She's thinking and a couple of yards away a twig snaps, and she spins around in time to see the moonlight glow dancing along the barrel of the gun as he levels it at her, playing over his pale face where it floats - moonlike itself - in the shadows, his eyes so big and dark. Beautiful.

"Put it the fuck down."

Quiet. Steady. Final.

She bends at the waist and lays her flashlight and her gun down at her feet. She's not afraid of him anymore.

It never could have gone any other way.


	41. the killer in me is the killer in you

**Chapter 41: the killer in me is the killer in you**

 _Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me, and here is the center of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from, but I can't go through with it._

 _I just don't want to die anymore._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He has the gun.

Looking at him cursorily in the half dark, she might assume that he's lost all his fear and all his rage, and he's stoic. Cold. That he has no qualms whatsoever about this. That he possesses none of the pain and terror that overwhelmed him when she found him, or his desperate love, or the atrocity that followed. That he's finally lost the war completely, that there's nothing left of him, that his eyes are as flat as his voice. Utterly dead.

But she's not looking at him like that, not cursorily, and she knows better than to assume.

His lips are trembling very, very slightly. So is the gun. His hand. He's still in there. He might be weak, fading, almost gone, but he's _still trying._

She stands, her hands at her sides, and simply looks at him. He's so strong. He's so beautiful. He's in ruins, and she loves him more than her own life and she thinks she has for a long time now. She thinks she might be able to be strong enough, for him, to do what she has to do.

Once she knows for certain what that is.

"You shouldn't have followed me," he murmurs.

"I know."

"Called you a _stupid little cunt._ You think I was wrong?"

She shakes her head. Everything inside her is liquefying and preparing to stream out of her like water. It feels good. "No."

"I gave you a chance. Bitch, I gave you so _many_ fuckin' chances. You didn't take 'em, you saw what happened. What I did." He snaps his other hand up, chambers a round. All her dreams. Every way she saw it happening. Every way she saw herself doing it. _Getting it right._ Perhaps her own brain was screaming warnings at her all this time, and she didn't listen, _refused_ to listen, and now her time is up. "You never did nothin'."

"I tried to help you."

"Fuck you." He swallows, shifts from one foot to the other, and now she sees that his trembling isn't so subtle. It's bubbling to his icy surface. He's cracking. "You come to take me back?"

She pulls in a long breath, briefly closes her eyes. She's cracking too, and she doesn't want to stop it. She doesn't want to stop anything. If it never could have gone any other way, then here with him in the moonlight and the graceful pines and the lonely song of a mockingbird, she wants to let it happen. "I don't know why I came out here."

She doesn't. Like he said: he's going to show her.

His head jerks to the side and his mouth twists sharply as the rest of him seems to twist as well, abruptly all pain, clearly _wracked_ with it. She thinks of holding him in the grass as it paralyzed him, took everything from him with its sheer ruthless enormity. His body is his enemy. His mind is his enemy. The _world_ is his enemy. This was never a war he could win. His strength defies belief but he's utterly, hopelessly outgunned.

"I ain't goin' back." Another strained grimace. "I don't belong in there."

"Do you belong out here?"

A shudder runs through him, and then she sees that standing around him is a crowd of dark, faceless figures like holes in the malevolent world, all his ghosts and all his demons, pressing in on him. Herding him relentlessly toward some edge from which there won't be any returning. "I thought maybe I… Maybe I'd belong with you." Grimace of rage as much as pain now, and he takes a step forward like he's stabbing the air with his body, his teeth bared and eyes shining dully in the moonlight. "You don't want me. You _shouldn't_."

 _Oh. Oh, no. No._ "I love you."

"You're a fuckin' liar." Even in the dimness she can make out the bone-white of his knuckles, more like bone than the rest of him. He's gripping the gun as if he's afraid he might drop it. As if someone or something might try to snatch it away from him. "I could make you. I could _make_ you belong. With me."

His features screw up tight, and she knows where and when she's seen this. The advent of his tears. No part of this isn't a waking nightmare, and she needs to be here for it. For him. For when he finally falls apart.

Like before.

"You think I could do it without killin' you?" He gestures with the gun again, dragging in a ragged, quivering breath. "Make you like me?"

"Is that what you want?"

He sobs. It's a broken sound, choked and barely human, and she thinks of wounded dogs, wolves, creatures with their legs crushed in traps, trying desperately to scramble free and injuring themselves worse every second they do, and not even understanding why it's happening to them. Knowing only one thing. "I just want it to _stop._ "

"So make it stop," she whispers, and she rips out her own heart and crushes it in her bloody fist, and he sobs again, louder - God, _he's in so much pain and he's so tired_ \- and raises the gun away from her and and squeezes his eyes shut and presses the shaking muzzle against his temple.

Holding her in the dark as she cried. Holding her so tight. _I don't want to be like this anymore. I want to get better._ Telling her that he loved her. Telling her over and over, like he needed to tattoo it on her mind. Like he needed her to remember. Like he needed her to remember him.

Asking for her permission to go.

"It's alright."

Riding out of her on nothing more than a breath. Almost inaudible, even to herself. But his eyes flicker open and meet hers.

And he falls apart.

Like everything else, it washes over him, nearly gentle in how it takes him. The shaking is worse and worse, rattling his teeth, breath coming in shallow gasps, and his avalanche starts in earnest as a low whine that rises in his throat and breaks through his mouth, breaks through everything, forces his dry cracks wide, and a final wrenching sob sends his arm collapsing to his side, gun thumping onto the soft forest floor, and as he follows it to his knees he's finally, _finally_ weeping.

She watches him, locked in place. Silent and airless.

She's never seen anyone cry like this.

It's more than weeping. It's an earthquake under his skin, shattering his ribs and pounding the marrow out of his bones, merciless jagged sobbing like his own body is trying to beat itself to death from the inside out, and his head falls back and he cries wordlessly up at the moon, mouth slack and face glowing wet with tears, and she thinks _he's beautiful._

 _God, he's so beautiful._

She's there to catch him just as he crumples forward, hauling him into her arms. He clutches frantically at her, nearly _writhing_ under the force of the flood, and all she can do is hold him in the shelter of her body as he soaks her shirt and her neck and her hair with tears as hot as his blood, cradle him, rock him like a child, murmur things that she herself doesn't fully understand.

That she loves him, perhaps. That she loves him so much. That she's never leaving him again. That he's all right.

This again. Always this, every time. He falls apart and she collects the pieces in her careful hands.

It never could have gone any other way.

* * *

She has no idea how long it lasts. The moon moves. She keeps half an ear focused outward, listening for the coming of the dead, but mostly she just keeps holding him, rocking him, feeling him bleed out and go limp as his breath slows and slows. It feels like one particular thing is happening to him now and she's not going to shy away from what it is.

She believed he was already dead by the time she pulled him into her arms. She never got to hold him as he died. She never got to say goodbye that way.

In her older nightmares prior to this ghastly resurrection, if the bullet didn't kill him instantly and he was aware of her while he was dying, he hated her. His eyes burned with it as the life seeped out of him. Silently, he mouthed that it was her fault. That she did it to him. That she killed him herself.

She no longer believes it would have been like that.

At last he's still and quiet. Long stretches of nothing between his exhausted breaths. Once or twice she wonders if he'll take another lungful at all.

She's beginning to consider vaguely what she should do next - what _they_ should do, whether it truly is advisable to attempt to get him back behind the walls or whether she should honestly entertain the idea of staying out here with him for the time being, when the leaf litter and pine needles rustle beside her and she feels something hard and cold against her hand. She looks down, blinking.

Polished slate sheen of metal in the moonlight.

He has the gun again. He has it by the slide, and he's nudging the grip against her fingers.

"Please," he whispers, and this is the last of it, the last of his strength, the last of everything he has and how he's choosing to use it. "Please. You gotta do it. I'm not strong enough."

She stares down at it. At him. At his thin form half sprawled in her lap, at how much of him is gone and how little of him is left, at how she can virtually see _through_ his scarred skin and damaged skull to how exhausted he is and how nearly impossible it is for him to keep fighting like this. How excruciating. How cruel it might be to make him try. The agony of his migraine-storms. His seizures of hateful rage and his fear that in the midst of one of them, he might hurt someone. Might do worse. Almost _did_ worse, to her, and probably by his own reckoning he did worse merely by getting as far as he did. The hideous things he thinks and sees and his terror of them. His wretched humiliation. His constant bewilderment. His dark gray loneliness. His endless loss. The torment of the knowledge of what was, and what could have been.

She takes the gun from him. Holds it. Has it.

Lays the muzzle gently against his temple.

He relaxes instantly, completely, and sighs. It's relief - it's a deeper relief than she's likely ever felt, can likely even imagine. He traveled six hundred miles because he believed she could make him better.

And she can.

"I love you, Beth."

His head is turned so she can see his face. He's smiling.

It's a beautiful smile.

And behind her eyes, in that fucking hallway where everything went wrong, he's cringing away from her, scrambling weakly like a trapped animal, one hand up as though he can protect himself from a bullet to the brain, and his face open and imploring. Shaking his head, shaking everywhere. So scared. So scared of _her,_ of what she's going to do to him.

 _No. I changed my mind. I don't want to. Please. Please, Beth. Please don't do it. I'll try, I swear I'll try. I won't be like that anymore. I can get better._

Tears shining in his eyes. Shivering. Maybe trying to smile at her through his fear. Trying to hope that she won't murder him. Trying to have faith.

 _Beth. I love you._

 _I can be all right._

This is _him,_ asking her to _do it,_ lying in her lap and waiting for her to make him better. But it's not all of him. It's not everything. And yes, there's all that _was_ and that's gone, and there's all that _could have been_ and that's gone too, but there's more.

There's all that _might be._

She raises the gun and with a single whip of her arm and a crash of underbrush she hurls it away.

He stiffens. Goes rigid.

Then an awful wail tears out of him, the worst sound she's ever heard him make. It claws its way into her ears, rises into the looming pines and shreds the night around them, jagged-edged with his anguish and his suffering and his fathomless despair. It's the hopeless cry of a man condemned.

To life.

She holds him tighter, her fingers combing through his hair as her own tears begin to bleed out of her. She feels like his cry sounds. She feels sick. She feels broken. She feels beaten down to nothing.

But she got it right this time. And yes, it's cruel. It's very cruel. So is she. Too often, love is cruelty. He taught her so much but he didn't need to teach her that, what she is and what she can do.

The world did it for him.

* * *

Once again time deforms. It dilates, stretches out, and it feels like it circles back on itself. The moon is no longer moving. There's no breeze, no mockingbird song, no distant groan of walkers. There's only her and him and this, a world that contains just the two of them, and inside it everything is quiet. _He's_ quiet, gone limp again, his final cascade of weeping subsided into heaving whimpers and finally into silence. Perfect multiple _deja vu._

She has no fucking idea what to do now. All she knows are the things she's _not_ doing.

She supposes that's better than nothing at all.

The moon. She looks up at it.

His moon. The light he followed because it was the light that didn't burn him, that didn't scorch his skin - which he imagined - and bring on the storms in his head - which he didn't. It was the light he walked under night after night, and she knows without having to ask him that there was hardly a night he wasn't moving, and probably in the day whenever he could. He had nothing to live for, no object and no goal and no purpose, except her.

He had faith in her. And it was more powerful and more _real_ than any faith she's ever held in anything.

 _Part of him believes it's possible. I think so. As long as that's true, he's not fucked. Not completely. As long as that's true, we've got some hope._

She leans down and in and presses her lips to the crown of his head. Faint glitter; his eyes are open. He's awake. More than awake: in spite of everything he's _still alive,_ and maybe that's enough for right now. Maybe that's all either of them needs.

And that's when the screams begin.

Not angry yells. _Screams,_ panic and pain, distant but very clear. She lost track of how far from the walls she went, but if she can hear it, they can't be that far. Shouts and more terrified screams, sharp echoing cracks that she can't mistake for anything other than gunfire, and as she jerks her head up and stares toward where the noise is coming from, she sees reddish light flickering against the treetops, the sky taking on a sullen glow.

He shifts in her arms, rolling over. In the periphery of her vision she sees him pushing himself up.

"It's the Safe Zone," she breathes - as if that isn't extremely obvious to him. "They're- _Shit,_ they're-" She's turning on her hands and knees and groping over the ground, through the hard shadows of the trees. She threw his gun away and she knows better than to waste time hunting for it, but hers is still here somewhere, and it's loaded.

Her hand closes on it. Her other is at her belt as she lifts it, unsheathing his knife and holding it out to him by the blade. He rocks back on his knees and blinks down at it as if he has no idea what it is.

She thrusts it at him impatiently. " _Take it._ "

Moving like a man years deep in a dream, he takes it.

Good. She shoves herself to her feet, ignoring the tingling in her waking limbs and ready to run, and glances back at him to make sure he's following. He's not. He's still on his knees, holding the knife and gazing up at her. Not confused anymore, no, but she has no idea how to define the look on his face.

She thrusts her hand down like the knife, already breathing hard as fresh adrenaline pumps through her. "Daryl. Fuckin' _c'mon._ "

But he's shaking his head, looking past her at the firelight on the clouds, the smoke now rising with it. He's not deep in a dream. This is his nightmare. This is the heart of it, coming true right before his wide, haunted eyes.

"I can't."

She's suddenly furious. All the torture he's made it through, all the imaginary horror he's been enduring every day, and now when it's _real_ and _here_ and she _needs him,_ he's balking. She knows his reasons, understands them like her own, and they're _bullshit._

"You _can,_ " she hisses, but he only shakes his head again, eyes lowered, knife held loosely in his lap.

She simply looks at him for a moment more, rage as her own fire in her head, and then she breaks. Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck him if he's just giving up like this. He can stay here, then. He can stay here alone and _die._

" _Coward."_ She spits it at him, all the contempt she can muster, contempt he finally _deserves,_ and turns on her heel and begins to run.

She doesn't look back.


	42. grace upon this road less traveled

**Chapter 42: grace upon this road less traveled**

 _What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I'm the dragon, that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon. I'm not the princess either._

 _Who am I?_ \- Richard Siken

* * *

She already knows what she's going to see. It still stops her in her tracks, breathless, mouth hanging open.

They didn't break through the wall this time. Their tactics have evolved. They went _over._

Something Beth has learned - and it didn't take her long to learn it - is that in moments like this, your brain short-circuits. It's not that it ceases to function, but it digs up the most random and least useful memory items and tosses them at you, flinging blindly as if in the hope that they might turn out to be helpful after all in the end. You remember completely unimportant things, mundanities, and you make absurd connections between them. Though sometimes the things it tosses at you aren't quite so random, and those connections turn out to be not so absurd after all. So now she looks at the intact walls of the Alexandria Safe Zone and the things leaning against them at intervals and she thinks about a history class in eighth grade - specifically a class wherein they did a unit on life in medieval castles. The unit included an exploration of castle defenses against sieges, and how those sieges were broken. Catapults. Digging.

Ladders. And fire.

She never believed it was really finished.

She jolts herself back into motion, rushes toward the half open gate. Not hard to glean more from that. Some of them got in and opened it from the inside, and the rest flooded in that way. How many? Many. Have to be many. That's really all that matters.

She's got her gun up and is already scanning for targets as she hurtles through into the carnage.

A glance upward reveals Mark sprawled over the edge of the platform with his neck hacked almost completely through, blood-soaked head dangling from his spine. He's turned, and his blank milky eyes stare at her as his twisted jaw clacks open and shut. He was just a kid, like she hasn't been in a long time. She was in the group that found him huddled in a Safeway storeroom. Once he figured out they were there to help him, he was so happy to see them. He hugged Glenn.

He was just a kid and he loved kids. He must have been so pleased about the balloons.

She barely spares him three seconds before she's moving again.

Smoke. Harsh flickering firelight everywhere; in the part of her brain gone cool and removed she notes that much of the flame is coming from discrete patches on the ground. Molotov cocktails, or something similar. Indistinct shapes lurching through the haze. She can't see how many. She can't aim when she doesn't know who she's aiming at. She grits her teeth and lunges into the smoke.

Bruce is down. Bruce is down with a woman in rags and black hair straddling him and raising a machete. One shot and the side of her head blows open and she collapses, still half on Bruce, who shoves her off with bloodstained hands. He tries to sit up, staring at her, and she's moving on.

Rattle of automatic gunfire and a couple of single shots; impossible to say how close. A shadow tears toward her out of the shadows and from the side, and she whirls and identifies the W and puts another bullet in its head, is searching again before she even sees it fall. Houses rising in front of and behind her. Some of them might be on fire. She can't tell.

(A significant amount of the blur her world has now become is due to the smoke and the flames, but not all, and she knows this. She truly experienced it first when the prison fell, when, in the seconds after she witnessed her father's head tumbling to the ground, a hazy red curtain descended over her perception and all she could feel was the weight of the rifle in her hands and the impact of its kick. Later, all she recalled was a despairing rage, a desire to destroy as many of those people as she possibly could, and a complete lack of inhibition or remorse. Their sin was a deadly one. They didn't get to live.)

(The haze did not impair her ability to fight. Rather, it enhanced it. She didn't pause to consider her targets. She simply fired. Afterward, in the light of all those dying fires, she stared into them until she made herself blind and she internally flagellated herself, that she could be so coldly murderous, regardless of how many of them she actually killed in the end. That she could be as terrible as they were. She hadn't known what she could do. She would have preferred never to find out. She never spoke about it, to him or to anyone, but it haunted her.)

(And what haunted her worst of all wasn't her shame. It was her pride.)

Brunette woman she can't identify backed up against one of the longer flights of steps up to the houses, her arms up to protect herself. She's holding a gun in her hand, clutching it, trying to aim. As Beth raises her own gun, the woman gets a shot off and hits the hatchet-wielding man pinning her in the shoulder. He reels back, snarling, and the woman is pushing herself up and attempting to aim again when the man cuts her arm two thirds of the way off at the elbow. At the same moment, Beth explodes his head. The woman falls, shrieking, blood pumping from her arm in rhythmic spurts. Beth sprints and crouches, rips away a strip of one of the man's rags and presses it to the wound. It's instantly soaked. The woman is sagging back, her eyes rolling up to the whites. Shock and blood loss. She doesn't have much time. And even then.

Now: recognition. This is Nina Ashbury. She helped plan the vegetable garden. She has a daughter, ten years old. Likes to paint. Isn't half bad.

Beth looks at her for a few seconds, straightens up and turns and walks away.

Ruthless calculus. She's numb all through, ice flowing from her heart through every artery and vein, but enough of her still feels for her to hate herself.

Her feelings are inconsequential. Other people here can still be saved.

She's running again, parsing more shapes, listening for familiar voices. Is looking over her shoulder when she stumbles against a broad chest, arms on her shoulders, and she's fighting, clawing and yanking her gun arm free, when she sees Rick's face tipped down to hers, hard and dreamlike in the light. His eyes are narrow, wolflike. He barely looks human.

" _Beth,_ fuck."

"They're back," she says. She says it calmly. "We weren't ready."

"For this? No." He shoots a glance to his left; downward flash of Michonne's sword a few yards away as she cuts one nearly in half. "There's more of 'em. _Hell_ of a lot more."

"How many?"

"Dunno. Maybe thirty. Maybe less, maybe more." He pauses a second, teeth bared; he's _talking_ to her like a human being, but he's not, and she can see it in his eyes beneath his instinctive fear. The red haze takes him too. And the difference between him and her is that while he's lost in it, he _enjoys_ it. "What hit us before? That was a fuckin' _scouting party._ "

"Kill them all," she whispers, shaking him off and backing away. She has no idea who she's talking to, whether she's instructing him or anticipating his intention or telling herself what she has to do. "Kill them all."

Doesn't matter. She's gone.

More fragments. Aaron herding Eric into one of the houses, whirling to shoot a pursuing girl in the chest and the stomach. Carol plunging a knife up through the jaw of another woman, the Wolf's tangled mop of hair burning at the ends. Carl and Enid, back to back, a kid who can't be much older than they are staggering and tumbling in a boneless heap at their feet. Rosita dodging the swing of a machete, kicking its owner to the ground. Other people whose faces are lost to that haze - because they aren't _her people_ and therefore matter less to her and she identifies this truth without being ashamed of it - taking Wolves down in the head, the chest, cutting the legs out from under them.

And falling. Rolling, screaming, trying to crawl away, gore-spattered blades shining dully as they crash down. Severed limbs. Staring eyes. Clothes and hair on fire, flesh blackening and cracking. Some of these Wolves she manages to kill. Some of them dart away before she can aim and squeeze. She runs through dancing flames and lakes of blood.

Denise and Tara. _Judith._ Where.

He wasn't merely insane. He wasn't merely hallucinating. He was seeing and speaking prophecy.

Somehow even then she knew.

The buildings _are_ on fire. Only two that she can see now, only one of them an actual house, but flames and thick smoke billow through broken front windows. She sees one woman scramble through, hands streaked with blood, and sends a bullet through the neck of the huge man waiting for her. She thinks that she's doing quite well. She doesn't know how many people she's killed so far but she suspects she's nearing double digits if she isn't there already.

She wouldn't kill him. She wouldn't. Blood in her mouth. She wouldn't kill him and she threw the gun away and he clung to her and cried out his agony.

Sudden tears and she's so fucking _angry,_ and weight slams into her from behind and then the concrete slams into her side.

She can't breathe. It's too soon to feel any pain. She's trying to roll over, grasping the gun, but there's nothing in her hand - in the corner of her eye she sees it a foot or so away. Darkness on top of her, bending down, stench of smoke and decay and madness.

Needle-glitter at its fingertips and rusty gleam of a grin.

It never could have gone any other way.

She's closing her eyes, turning her head so she won't have to watch him kill her, and then he jerks back and howls, and she raises her eyes in time to see not Daryl, no, but a young man with stringy brown hair and a W carved into his brow twisting, groping and furiously trying to shake something loose.

Groping at the familiar face looming over his shoulder with lips pulled back in a snarl as the knife plunges into the side of his throat.

Blood splashes into her eyes and stings like a _bitch_ , and she rolls onto her side again, scrubbing at them and whining at the same time as she fumbles blindly for her gun. Suddenly it presses against her fingers, someone putting it into her hand, and she manages to see enough to look up and see _him._

Leaning over, curling a firm arm around her, pulling her up to sit. Pushing her hair back from her face and peering at her. Searching.

Silently mouthing her name.

 _I'm alright,_ she whispers - she could be whispering. He might not be able to hear her. But he might. _I'm alright, Daryl._

He nods, fingertips lingering at her face, then springs to his feet with his knife clutched in his blood-streaked hand and vanishes into the careening shadows.

She's on her feet too, staggering only a little. She hesitates, glancing rapidly around, then drops back to one knee, setting down the gun and drawing her knife, and stabbing it viciously two-handed between those two dead and staring eyes.

He's not a monster. He's just a man.

They're all just men.

* * *

She loses time again as the haze returns, but at some point it becomes apparent to her that they're thinning out. None of them are running - none of them _ever_ seem to run - but she's seeing more of them sprawled dead on the ground than she's seeing them up and alive, the cries fewer and farther between and many of them triumphant, and as she blows out the right kneecap of another young kid, knows she's spent her last round and tosses the gun away, she feels little anxiety as she draws her knife again and leaps onto him to finish the job.

Not that she was feeling much anxiety anyway. But it's okay. It's _not_ okay, but it's okay. Her knife will very likely do now.

She's turning, looking around for Rick or Carol or Michonne or _him,_ when she sees the crowd gathering around the burning house.

A couple of other isolated buildings are burning as well, but this one is the worst, heat prickling her skin and stretching it tight as she sprints toward it. Panicked faces, the damnably familiar look of fear-paralysis, and Rick standing close to the front, pushing forward as Michonne tries to drag him back.

Her voice somehow audible above the crackle and roar: " _The whole thing's gonna come down! You'll fucking kill yourself!_ "

She can't hear what Rick says in response - except then: _Jessie._

 _Sam._

She shoulders people aside, and what she'll do when she reaches Rick is a complete mystery to her but whatever is driving her isn't something she can fight. Carol is shoving him aside as well, her red knife in her red hand and her face set and awful-

And Daryl just about knocks her down as he sprints toward it.

Rick is yelling, grabbing for him, but he's already gone, shot straight through the partially collapsing doorway like a blood-covered bolt and devoured by the fire.

The haze has lifted. But something else has taken its place, a kind of numbness utterly new to her. She's at Rick's side without knowing exactly how she got there, hand on his forearm, gazing unblinking at the blaze and ignoring the tiny needles the smoke is jabbing into her eyes. The house is an inferno, sections of wall sagging and crashing inward, roof half gone. It's unattached as well, so it might not take out the entire Zone with it, but it.

It.

She saw him shot in the head. She shot him, over and over. She was ready to do it for real, for always. Make him die and hold him in her arms while it happened. It wasn't only believable; it was _imminent._

A bullet is quick. Painless. Him burning alive in his own nightmare fire…

That's too much.

Nothing. At some point the cries fell silent, or at least she can no longer hear them over the howling inside her skull, sound that translates itself into sensation and wrenches every muscle in her body into a cramp that almost topples her. Rick, motionless, Michonne holding him with an arm around his middle and following his focus, and Carol standing with her arms limp at her sides… And she's seen them look like this before. Exactly like this.

 _Can you lose him again?_

 _Can you?_

She still doesn't know.

Something moves.

At first she's certain it's just another part of the house falling in, shadows in the red-gold light. But it gets bigger, clarifying its form, and then he's stumbling through the door, arm wrapped around a woman's waist and half carrying her as she slumps against him, head hanging loose between her shoulders. Collective gasp, cry, Michonne releasing Rick as he staggers to catch Jessie's body when Daryl lets her go and she pitches forward. Beth has time to see his face black with soot, _all_ of him black, living darkness, before he turns and in a flicker of movement he disappears back into the house, and she's breathless and reaching for Carol's strong side. Because she _can't,_ she knows now: she can't lose him again, she can't do it, not like this, please God _not like this_.

He's a man made of night, emerging and burning with a child in his arms.

Jessie is lying on the grass some distance away, and Beth spots Denise kneeling beside her, along with a blood-soaked kid she recognizes as Ron. Tobin is rushing over to take Sam in his arms, and as he does Daryl crumples, drops to his hands and knees and curls inward, wracked with coughing, falling the rest of the way onto his side. She can't make out his face as she lurches toward him, Carol ahead of her, but his hair is on fire, his clothes, and then Carol is beside him as he rolls in the grass, slapping at the flames with her bare hands, beating at them until they're gone.

And it's just him, still coughing raggedly, shaking, shoulders heaving as he struggles to drag in a full breath.

Alive.

As she sinks down next to Carol and reaches for him, she's sure she can feel the tears turning to steam on her cheeks.

But he's pulling back, pulling away. Not panicked. Not scared at all as far as she can see. His eyes are pale and brilliant in his blackened face - and as he pushes himself up and returns his gaze to the fire, he's entirely _there_. No echo. No ghost.

All of him.

Or more than she's ever seen since he was taken from her.

She and Carol are both grasping his trembling shoulders, trying to tug him back down, but with shocking speed he's on his feet, still staring unblinking at the fire, lifting a hand to half shield his eyes but not once looking away. Everyone else has faded into the background. Even she feels abruptly less _real_ than what she's seeing now. Him, silhouetted against his nightmare holocaust, scorched and seared but completely unafraid.

"What does he see?" Rick's stunned gasp in her ear. "Beth… What the hell does he _see?_ "

She shakes her head. It's all she can do, and she can barely do that. She watches, motionless, as Daryl lowers his arm and stands there unprotected, head tilted back and eyes closed and an expression on his blackened face that she couldn't hope to ever define. A few more seconds and he lifts his hands palm-up, and as the doorway finally collapses and sends a burst of sparks dancing upward, he catches them like rain as they fall.

He's smiling.

It's a beautiful smile.

* * *

So. After.

He knows this feeling. This is exhaustion, bone-deep and all-consuming. But he doesn't know it, not actually. This is not the kind of exhaustion that hurts. This is not the kind of exhaustion that shatters him and pounds his pieces into dust, that ruins him more than he's ruined already, that makes him want to be dead.

He's just really, really fucking tired.

And he does hurt. A lot. But that's okay. He's not certain exactly _why_ it's okay. He simply knows that it is.

He's sitting on the steps of one of the houses, hands loose between his knees, well away from the fire. It's still burning and it's painful to look at, and he can feel stormclouds gathering and churning angrily in the back of his skull and behind his left eye, but he mostly doesn't care. If it comes, it comes. He's survived it before. He can survive it again.

Apparently he can survive just about anything.

It's painful but now and then he _does_ look at it, and he looks at it for as long as he can bear to. Because he knows it's a fire and it almost killed people, almost killed _him,_ but that's not what he sees. He sees what he saw when he got to his feet after he made it out, when he stood there and he basked in its gentle warmth.

He sees the sun.

It rained light down on him, and he wasn't destroyed.

Hasn't seen Beth since then. She's all right, so that's all right.

He will.

Denise was here. Denise was crouching in front of him, touching him, and he gathered she was doing that to make sure that he wasn't going to die immediately, and it's possible that he told her so, but either way she left him alone and rushed away after she satisfied herself, and that's also okay. Because he looks away from the fiery sun and around at the wreckage, and he sees dead people - a fair number of them are because of him, but nowhere near all. More, there are injured people. Can't help the dead ones of their own, but the injured ones, maybe, and she should try to help them and not waste her time on him when he thinks he might really be all right.

You know. All right enough. _For government work,_ as they say, or said when governments were a thing, and for some reason that strikes him as funny and he smiles and would laugh except smiling makes his face hurt worse. So he doesn't. But he'll do it inside himself, and it's nuts but it feels bizarrely good.

Not _for some reason._ His reason is that he's utterly, literally insane.

But also he's all right. Or it's possible that he will be. It's remotely possible. At some point between lying weeping in Beth's lap under the pines and stabbing his fourth man right in the W carved into his brow, he realized that it truly was. What's inside him is hideous, what he's capable of is hideous as well, and even now he looks at so much of it and recoils in appalled disgust, wants to claw at himself and bite his own lips and tongue until he bleeds, be punished like he deserves, but he's _right here._ Surviving _._

As long as that's true, something more is possible. Technically. He has to own that.

And then Rick is here.

He doesn't remember Rick arriving. Rick is just _here,_ not there and then present, existing in roughly the same time and space as him, and with faint surprise he recognizes that he feels no anger and no resentment over this fact. Rick isn't here to hurt him worse. Rick isn't here to manipulate him or rub his nose in anything, make him do something he doesn't want to do. Rick is here with him, and he doesn't feel like he needs an explanation for why. Rick can go where he likes.

Rick can be here beside him if he wants to be.

"You doing alright?"

Shrug. Enough. Tired. Hurts. So he says so, and Rick nods.

"Denise says you're not burned too bad. Says she'll need to give you a closer look when she gets a chance. But." Grim smile. Not actually much of a smile at all. He nods around at what remains of the Zone. Which is probably more than there should be, all things considered. "I think she's gonna be kinda busy for a while."

Grunt. Wince, because his throat hurts too, and especially much. Smoke sucks. As a phenomenon, he's no longer in favor of it. Right now he can't imagine wanting a cigarette ever again.

"We should've been ready." Soft. Rick shakes his head. He sounds abruptly shellshocked. "After last time. _Shit._ " He swipes a hand down his face. It aches to look at him. He keeps losing people. They all do. Just like how in the end they always run.

But they're not going to run this time.

He licks his cracked lips. Whispers, almost a response. _So many._

"Yeah. And we killed 'em all, but… Might still not be all."

Long quiet. It's not comfortable, but neither is it _un_ comfortable, and in his pain and his exhaustion he's content to exist within it. He's dimly aware that there are specific things he's not thinking about. That this may very well have been the worst day of his life - of both of his lives. That today he committed sins for which he'll have to answer, and it's more than possible that he doesn't even remember all of it. That it's worse than he knows.

It's possible that he won't be allowed to stay.

But then there's Rick's hand heavy and solid on his shoulder, and before he realizes it he's leaning into the touch, eyes closed, sighing.

There is a pertinent question.

 _Everyone alright?_

"Ours? Cuts and bruises, mostly. Michonne got a couple deep ones but she'll be okay. Carl got Judith out early, she's fine. Others… Lost seven, looks like. Bunch more hurt bad." He pauses, a deep pause. "But it would've been a lot worse if it wasn't for you. You were in the thick of it. I saw you. You saved a lot of people tonight."

He wants to shake his head. Deny it. What he did was he _killed,_ because it's what he does best. He doesn't really believe he saved anyone in the end. But Rick… Rick is an idiot, so Rick does. Could be better to just let Rick keep on believing that. At least for now.

Anyway, he's far too weary and in far too much pain to argue.

"I can't make you stay. I can't make you do anything. I was stupid for trying, I'm sorry. But Daryl." Opens his eyes and his head turns, and there are those eyes boring into his, so familiar, so blue and bright, and he realizes that the sky is lightening and the fire is no longer the only source of illumination.

The sunrise is coming. Soon.

"Daryl. I want you to stay." That warm, solid hand squeezes, and his throat clenches itself closed as his eyes prickle, and it's not bad. Not all bad. Not at all. "There could be a place for you here. There _could._ We could make one, all of us, together. I told you, you _saved_ people. This place needs you." Rick takes a breath. It shudders. His eyes are shining, pools of dawn. " _I_ need you."

He looks at Rick in silence for a long time. _A place_. No. He doesn't think so. Not like Rick means, or wants to mean. But the truth is that none of them has a place here. This place itself _does not belong,_ and it never could, and he doesn't belong in the middle of it and he doesn't think he could ever do that either. Where he's gone, he doesn't get to come back. That man is dead. That man rotted away to nothing in the trunk of a car.

Rick was wrong. No one gets to come back. Not anymore. You come back as someone else. Someone different. You can't be who you were. You have to be who you are. And you give up, or you find a way to make it work.

You try.

He's so fucking tired. He closes his eyes against the fire and the dawn and all the light and he ignores the discomfort of friction against his burned skin and leans against Rick's warm solid side, and then all at once there are warm solid arms encircling him and gentle hands stroking over his back. Fingers sliding through his singed hair. Rick is shaking, a little.

"I love you," Rick breathes. "I love you, brother."

And then he's shaking as well, releasing something he's been dragging around for so long, too fucking _long,_ something very much like Merle's caved-in face. He's letting it go and he's holding onto his brother so tight, and he hurts, everything hurts, and part of him feels full of snarling hatred and viciously buzzing flies… But that shit is not all he is. Not every part of him has to be ugly. This is all right.

He can be all right.

 _I love you too._


	43. there'll be no more going half the way

**Chapter 43: there'll be no more going half the way**

 _You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that. I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that. You weren't supposed to._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

The sun is rising over the roofs of the ruined houses beyond the wall when he finds her.

She's sitting on her platform, staring out at the world with her bloody knife in her hands. She's not facing inward, and somehow neither of these things comes as a surprise to him, though the platform is expansively stained red where that kid's body was before they got him down. Neither does it surprise him that she waited for him to come to her. Could be she was waiting for him to work up the courage, but he doubts it was exactly that. It's not that she thought he would be too afraid of her.

She called him a coward and she wasn't wrong, but not about this. Even though he probably should be one.

He did what he did. Fear is not what he feels.

He doesn't think there's a word for what he feels.

She gives him a glance when he tops the ladder, then scoots aside to make room for him. It's an invitation, clear enough, and he sits down beside her with his legs dangling over the edge alongside hers. It was difficult to get here. He limped the whole way, and the pain of everything - skin and bones and brain - twisted his breath around his ribs. But he had to, and he had to do it alone. And just as it's not about fear, it's not about punishing himself. He suspects she would say that he's done enough of that.

It's just something he has to do.

His head is pounding out a blood soaked drumbeat but it's bearable.

There's silence, and he lets the silence stretch out. There's noise behind them: groans, sobs, tense discussion, _weary_ discussion, as weary as he feels. The collection of the dead is still going on, outside the walls the digging of a pit for the burning of the ones who weren't their own and soon, inside, the digging of graves for the ones who were. People did die tonight. They weren't able to save everyone. And the fires are still burning, though they're beginning to burn themselves out, and the spread has been astonishingly minimal.

Regardless, here everything is muted. Removed. It's like he said the first time he came to see her.

Nothing can touch her.

But finally he does speak. It's like the claws of a bird scraping down the back of his throat, but he does. Low and rough but loud in this little world she's created around herself.

"Beth. I. I can't-" And he turns his head and for the first time in good light he truly _sees_ the bruises circling her throat and the blue-black bracelet of them around her wrist and he can't take it, wretched shame cannonballing into his breastbone, his nails digging into the meat of his palms. He didn't honestly expect that he would be able to do this. Needed to come up here, needed to try, but there's no apologizing for what he did to her. There's no excusing it, no running from it. Nothing he can possibly say can ever make it better.

Even if he knows - _knows_ \- that he'll never do it again. It doesn't change anything. He was capable of it. He is.

He now knows what he can do.

"Stop," she whispers hoarsely.

So he stops - though he's mostly stopped already. And it's quiet again, for a long time. There's breeze sweeping through the leaves all around them. There's a warbling series of notes from a mockingbird, a blackbird's trill. Below them, close to the wall, the sulky moan of a walker.

Neither of them has a gun anymore.

"You did it," she says at last - murmurs, voice still rough. He takes the three words as truth. Opens to them. "We can't go back."

"Yeah."

She releases a deep, shuddering breath. "It wasn't you."

"It was."

"No." She turns, looks at him, and the tears in her eyes don't surprise him either. He can try to imagine the ways in which he hurt her, but he knows there's a healthy amount of it that he won't ever grasp. He can't. It would be an insult to her to think he possibly could. "It wasn't. It was somethin' else."

"Beth. It was me." He stares down at his hands - as blackened as the rest of him, nasty blisters rising all along the back of his right one, blood crusted around his nails, and for once it's not only his. Though that used to be a lot more of a regular thing. "I wasn't fuckin' _possessed_ or nothin' _._ I knew what I was doin'." He clenches his hands into fists and the skin on three of his knuckles cracks. Clear fluid seeps out. "I didn't wanna do it. But I knew."

"But you _didn't want to._ " Her voice is quiet, even. She's not exactly arguing with him, even if she's denying what he's saying. It's more as if she's pointing things out, facts, parts of this and of _him_ that he should bear in mind. "Everythin' went wrong. Wrong as it could've gone. It was like…" She tilts her head back and breathes, smiles tightly and rubs one-handed at her glistening eyes - spreading blood and grime around. "Everythin' fell apart. Yeah, it was your fault. But it wasn't."

"I'm broken," he says softly. He waits for the surge of self-hatred, and though there's shame, it doesn't come. Instead he's washed over and through with a kind of calm acceptance. This is not a cudgel to beat himself with. This is a recognition of how things are. Of who he is, and how he can't be who he was. He's not a monster, or a demon. He's broken, and it's not an excuse. It's just a context.

"You're sick."

He gives her his own thin little smile. "Yeah. That too."

"We're both broken." She lowers her head, her hair hanging in dirty strands around her face. They're both filthy and they smell awful, though characteristically he's far worse than she is. Both coated in blood, soot, and she's also burned here and there. Very likely no one made it through last night without being touched by fire.

But she's unfathomably beautiful, her skin and hair all bathed in sunlight. As always, she's bright enough to hurt him. And he won't, not unless he's certain she wants him to and maybe not even then, but he's filled and almost overwhelmed with the urge to touch her, simply to confirm to himself that she's _real_ and she's _here,_ and so is he. That whatever else has gone catastrophically wrong, they're here, together.

That they made it.

"I don't want it to ruin us," she says finally, and pulls in another breath, once again wipes at her eyes. "I wanna be stronger than that. I wanna be better. I still want an _us._ Whatever that means." She raises her face to him, and this time the smile she gives him through her tears is wider - so pained and sad and terribly hopeful. "Everythin' is shit and it's even worse now, everythin's been shit for so long, but you're _here,_ and you're _alive,_ and I want… I _want_ that. I'm not sayin' you can, I'm not even sayin' we should, and what happened still… It _happened…_ but I do."

He wants to say something to her, to that. He wants to say something very badly. But the words don't come and every muscle in the center of his chest sucks itself into a dense ball of pure agony that radiates outward, rippling through his bones and joining the storm in his head, and he trembles and leans forward and covers his face with his hands because it's the only thing he can do.

He covers his face with his hands and lets it all flow, and her hand is on his back, her head on his shoulder. Her lips - She kisses the side of his neck. It stings and he remembers why, and he trembles harder.

He doesn't know what to do with forgiveness.

Might be time to learn.

"I love you," she whispers, and he sobs, quiet, and this too is all right. And when he raises his head at last, everything still a watery blur, she takes his hand and presses it to her cheek, and without pausing to think about it, he swipes his thumb across the ashy track of her tears. Her scar.

"I love you." Shaky, but he gets it out, and he manages what comes after. "I want it."

She sags against him with her own shaky sound, and he can't believe he can do it and he can't believe she's letting him but he circles his arms around her and she _fits,_ she fits like she basically always has - and he has no illusions about any of this. This is still fucked up. _He's_ still fucked up. None of that is over. None of it is gone. He didn't walk into the fire and come out magically healed, the infected parts of him burned away and his mind cleansed. That hole, whether real or imaginary, is still in his skull. That bullet still carved its path through his brain, did what it did to him, and nothing that happened last night reversed its course and rewound it backward out of him and repaired what it destroyed. His head is killing him. Every inch of his internal terrain is run through with tremors, and what lurks beneath is terrible. Dark things are flitting around the corners of his vision like malevolent butterflies.

But maybe he can be all right.

After a while - no idea how long and it doesn't matter - he pulls back from her, gazes at her, shifts his focus down to his hands. Somehow, somewhere along the way, they began to represent everything. They've become the external thing by which he evaluates his interior. He looks at them and he perceives himself.

Torn and raw.

"I think I shouldn't see you for a while." He looks away, out over the treetops at a world in which he doesn't belong. Not that he belongs in the world behind him, either. "I gotta get my head right." He huffs a quick laugh, shakes his head. "Righter than this, anyhow."

He half expects her to protest. But she doesn't. She only nods, and she takes his torn, raw hand again in both of hers. She's so careful with him, but like every other touch now, it's painful - and he welcomes every part of it. Not least because yes, it might be some time before he feels it again. He might carry this pain as something precious, as a reminder. A promise to himself.

He's going to try.

He doesn't know if it's going to work. He doesn't know if he can get his broken head right. He doesn't know if he can get better. But he supposes that it wouldn't kill him to have a little faith. Faith is why he's here.

Faith is why he's alive.


	44. on heaven's stretch

**Note:** Just want to say again that I'm not a mental health professional and have no formal training in psychiatry or counseling, and everything I'm doing here is drawn from what I know from my own experience of treatment for various things. So it's very possible that I'm getting some stuff wrong. Please forgive if so. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 44: on heaven's stretch there'll be no more dying**

 _I'm in the hallway again, I'm in the hallway. The radio's playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I'll keep walking toward the sound of your voice._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

They walk home together through the smoldering wreckage. In the center of the street they say goodbye without saying anything at all, and when she gently frames his face and leans up and kisses his mouth, it's soft and it's chaste and it doesn't linger. She doesn't need to linger, and he doesn't need her to.

This is not that kind of goodbye.

She turns, goes to her door and inside. He goes to his. Separated by a band of pavement, they both climb into cool showers - her stepping over dried streaks of blood that have no more power to trouble her - and lean against the tile until they're almost in a standing doze. They blink slowly as the spray runs off their lashes and the ends of their hair, sinking into the faint twinges as it runs over their cuts and burns, and they watch the water circling the drain make the transition from black-brown to cloudy gray to clear.

She pads silently down the hall, toweling off her hair. Her room is bright with mid-morning sun. Normally she would probably pull down the shade, but this time she leaves the towel in a careless heap on the floor and crawls naked and still damp into bed, and tugs the rumpled covers up over herself. His scent lingers like her kiss didn't, and perhaps beneath the surface there are rumbles of disquiet, but above them she's peaceful and it doesn't trouble her any more than his blood did. She wraps her arms around one of her pillows and pulls it firmly against her, closes her eyes into the sunlight and is asleep in minutes.

He doesn't sleep in his bed - his _nest_. It's not a bed, and he doesn't want it to be his. Not anymore. He stands there just as naked as her and looks at it, head slightly cocked like a thoughtful animal. Then he pulls on a shirt and a loose pair of pants and scoops up a blanket, one of the pillows, and walks out to the back yard. He curls up in the grass in his patch of shade and feels the breeze drying his hair and the droplets clinging to his skin.

The air is still thick with smoke, and now when the wind shifts the smoke is joined by the odor of burning flesh. But somehow it doesn't hit him as strongly as it did - maybe he's just used to it - and as far as noise goes, a kind of exhausted peace seems to have descended. It's quiet. There are voices, but they're low. He can hear Rick inside the house, saying something to Michonne. His family is close. He's not alone.

Shadowy things crawl around him, but they keep a wide berth. At least for now, they won't come near him. For now, he's safe from them. Like so many other things, that's enough.

He sleeps, and as he does the storms roll through and past and leave him be.

* * *

"I dunno how you do it."

He blinks at Denise. She rolls back from him in her chair, roll of gauze loose in her hands, still scanning him. Shaking her head very slightly, incredulous in a gentle way. His face feels tight and hot like a bad sunburn, more blisters are rising on his arms and the backs of his hands, and speaking of his arms and the backs of his hands, the hair there is almost completely gone. In a few places the cuts on the inside of his arms are burned as well, and they hurt like a _motherfucker._ His hair is even more ragged and uneven than before, and the sharp stinking of it on fire has stubbornly persisted despite the washing.

But she's cleaned him up, restitched, spread salve on the parts of him that need it. Wrapped and bandaged. She didn't ask about the bite on his neck, merely cleaned it and covered it, and he's more than content with that.

Afternoon of the day after the worst day of his life, and he actually feels…

He feels good. Or this might be what _good_ feels like. It's not an entirely familiar sensation, so he might be partially guessing.

He shifts on the examining table. He's not uncomfortable there. Just restless. "Do what?"

"Uh, _live?_ " She laughs softly. "You know you should be dead so many times over by now? You're like a fucking _cat_. Except I bet you're up to way more than nine."

"Indoor cat," he murmurs, flexes his hand to feel the pain - and not for the reasons he used to. There's something weirdly pleasant in the jab through his nerves.

Denise arches a brow. "Huh?"

Head-shake. Actually a tiny hint of a smile, though it hurts. "Nothin'."

He still doesn't know which he is. He wonders if it's possible to be both.

The room isn't empty. Over by the window, Tara is tending to a woman with burns about the same severity as his and an ugly gash along the left side of her brow. A man is lying in the bed upstairs with an arm missing just below the shoulder and an IV of whole blood beside him. Others in their houses, also - just as Rick said - hurt bad. He knows Denise has been all over all day, deputizing anyone she reasonably can, and he would be able to draw that conclusion even if she hadn't told him so and he hadn't waited to be seen until this point. Her face is drawn and pale and deep circles pit the spaces under her eyes. Tara doesn't look much better. Though she also seems to have escaped without significant injury.

Rick was right. It could have been so much worse. He's still doubtful regarding how much of that is due to him, but it's true.

Denise reaches up, uses surprisingly unhesitant fingertips against his chin to turn his head toward her, searching his face. Though perhaps it's not really so surprising. "How're you doing otherwise?"

He doesn't need to ask for clarification. It's more than what he did to his arms; he doesn't remember very much about his little episode of _party crashing_ but he does remember that she saw him. Was badly rattled, nervous, but tried to calm him down.

He meets her gaze, shrugs. Wonders if she'll ask for more detail and hopes so much that she doesn't, because his head is hurting again, though not anywhere near unbearable, and articulating his state of mind involves more effort than he cares to expend on it.

She doesn't. Instead she nods down at the bandages on his arms. "You gonna do that again?"

He doesn't balk. Shakes his head. No. He's not. At least he doesn't anticipate it, though he honestly can't be sure. She'll know that, and understand.

"Have you tried other times? That I don't know about?"

A few seconds of reticence this time. Then he nods. There's no point in denying it. There's no reason to hide it from her. What, some twisted kind of pride? What the fuck is that worth? What has it _ever_ been worth?

"Did you have a plan? Or did you just do it?"

"Just did it." His voice is low, rough, almost grating in his own ears. It's not as hard to tell her this as maybe it should be. Perhaps because he can't detect an iota of judgment in her quiet voice. She doesn't sound disappointed in him. She doesn't sound upset at all.

She merely wants to know what she's dealing with.

He lifts one arm, looks at the bandages. Feels a species of grim amusement. "I fuckin' suck at it anyway."

She smiles faintly. "Yeah. You really do." She pauses a beat, head tilted. He's reminded oddly of Rick. "Are you still thinking about it?"

He lowers his arm. Takes a breath. He's told her things. He's told her horrible things. He's told her horrible things as a form of aggression, trying to hit her with them. As if he was grabbing her by the hair and rubbing her nose in his shit, forcing her to look at everything ugly and wretched and horrific inside him. Forcing her to look at the monster he was so certain was all of him, punishing her for daring to care. He was never telling her about any of it with any expectation that it might make him _feel better._

But looking back, he realizes that sometimes - a very few times to be sure but even so - it did.

"Yeah," he whispers, because he is. It's always in the back of his mind, rattling around like dry bones. Not even only killing himself, not always. But dying.

He's so close to it. All the time.

She nods, and she looks as if she expected this. "Thinking about it doesn't mean you have to do it. Doesn't mean you're _going to._ " She covers his hand with hers, and it stings a little but he doesn't pull away. "They're just thoughts, Daryl. They can't hurt you. They can't hurt anyone else. I know it seems like it, I know they're scary as shit, but they can't _do_ anything."

His gaze flits past her. In the corner of the room, a shadow moves jerkily. Black tendrils beginning to snake along the wall like infection spreading through a network of veins. Click of needle claws.

"The things you see can't hurt you either," she says, her voice even lower, and he squeezes his eyes shut. Ducks his head. Wants to believe her so _bad,_ and believing is as scary as the things themselves. It sends beetles of terror crawling under his skin. Believing and then being wrong. Because hasn't he hurt people? Hasn't he hurt himself? Isn't that true? Can he afford to dismiss any of it? Can he afford to be wrong?

He curls inward, grips the sides of his head. Suddenly everything is much too loud. Not anything that was here before but the hissing coming from the corners. The cracking as holes open up in the walls and waves of ants begin to pour through.

 _I don't wanna be like this anymore._

He forces his eyes open, looks up at her. She's watching him closely, but keeping a distance - he knows for his safety, not for hers - and he's so fiercely grateful for that.

For a lot of things.

"That shit you was talkin' about before. _Medication._ " He drags in another shuddering breath. Another. It's all beginning to fade. "Could that really help?"

"Honestly?" She sits back and crosses her arms, mouth tight at one side. "I dunno. It might."

"What about when we run out?"

"I guess we'd have to deal with that, then." She's silent a moment, then pushes forward. "Look, here's the bottom line. Your brain is _exhausted._ It's been dealing with all of this completely on its own for… God, for months. If nothing else, it could maybe give you a _break._ Give you a chance to get your breath. Then we could figure other things out."

Frown. This sounds complicated. "Like what?"

"Like strategies? Alternatives. For handling things when you don't have it anymore. Daryl…" She leans forward again, gaze unwavering behind her smudged glasses. "You're never gonna be like you were. What you're dealing with now, it probably won't ever go away. Not totally. But it could be… _managed._ You can learn to live with it." Another faint smile, and he can detect nothing false behind it. "I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard. Might be the hardest thing you've ever done. Harder than what got you here. But if you really want to… If you really want to, I think you can."

It's like he's drowning in what she's saying. Flailing, kicking, trying to keep his head above the surface. He could collapse onto the floor and lie there like a stranded fish, gasping. He can barely get enough air to speak. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." She touches him again, his hand. He stares down at it. She touches him so much, relatively speaking, and he doesn't actually want her to stop. "You can make it work."

And he finally does get a breath. A full breath. Thinks about what she said. Doing exactly that. How she's right, how he hasn't been able to breathe for months, how he doesn't remember what it's like to not be so tired he can barely move and moving anyway.

 _I wanna get better._

Very shaky, hardly audible: "Alright."

"Alright." She gives his hand a careful squeeze. Another smile. "When do you want to get started?"

He returns the smile. Doesn't know what it looks like to her, but it feels okay, and he doesn't have to try for it. It just comes.

"Ain't got no plans or nothin'." He sighs and looks toward the window, and the light stabs at his eyes but he does it anyway. He's going to take the pain like he never has, look at everything and not be the first one to blink. There are some things he's going to have to get used to. "For I guess… Forever."

* * *

Early that evening, Carol shows up at her door without being asked. She's carrying a bucket and some rags. Beth looks at these things, looks at her, and doesn't ask how she knew. She steps aside and lets her in without a word.

There aren't any words as she fills the bucket with water, adds soap. Tosses in the rags. Carol follows her to the bathroom, stands in the doorway for a moment and surveys the carnage. Beth hasn't yet put on any lights, and a shaft of the late sun turns Carol's hair from silver to a pale gilded gold.

Her face is difficult to read.

"Shit," she breathes at last, shakes her head. This shouldn't come as any surprise to her - Carol knows very well by now how much blood is in someone and how much they can lose and not die - but what Beth sees in her eyes is akin to surprise nevertheless. As if she knew it would be bad but didn't really understand the degree.

It's more blood than they saw in the hallway. Or it looks like more.

"Denise said he wasn't really tryin' to do it."

Carol shoots her a look, a tight smile. "Yeah, well, could've fooled me." Beth waits for her to continue but that appears to be the only comment she cares to offer at present. She nods at the bucket in Beth's hands. "Let's get to it."

Silence again as they lower themselves to their knees and start to wipe down the floor. Beth sees now - in a way she had been too overwhelmed with dreadful shock to catch - how right Denise was. He didn't hit an artery. There's no spray, no sign of any significant pressure at all. Except for a couple of exceptions, the cuts weren't deep. He _flowed,_ and not heavily. He trickled, dripped. The dried puddles are much smaller now than they seemed before. His blood is _everywhere,_ looks almost like he was intentionally spreading it around, but it's partially an optical illusion, its darkness against the pale tile.

 _Trying to try_. But he was like her. He didn't actually want to. He never wanted to. He believes he's wanted to die, and maybe part of him has, but now she remembers what he said to her in his room that day when she was bandaging his hands. The fine distinction he made. He's always been impatient with the squirrely parsing of semantics. He doesn't make distinctions like that unless they truly mean something to him.

 _I don't wanna die. But I wanna be dead. All the time._

"He's doing better," Carol says - quiet, but it makes Beth start a little. _Woolgathering,_ her father might have said. She looks up; Carol is looking back at her, unmoving with her wrung rag in her hand, and her expression…

One of the oddest mixes of relief and concern and wary caution that Beth has ever seen.

"Yeah?"

Carol inclines her head, sighs. "For now. Denise saw him." She jerks her chin at Beth. "You need to go see her too. You got banged up . And there's _your head._ " Pointed tone, and Beth knows she knows. And more, worse. Because Carol's gaze drops slightly and comes to rest beneath Beth's chin.

The bruises at her throat. She actually forgot. For a short, blessed while. Not that the thing happened, but that it left any mark anyone could see and she wouldn't be able to merely explain it away. At least not now, and not with this woman.

If anyone would know exactly what they were looking at.

"I'm alright," she whispers. "'s not as bad as it looks."

Is that true? Internally, she shrugs.

Carol continues to look at her for a moment or so, gaze unyielding. But she says nothing, and eventually Beth realizes that she isn't _going_ to. The Carol of a couple of years ago would have. She would have picked and pushed, far too hesitant to be genuinely nagging but unwilling to leave it alone. This Carol looks at her and at the evidence of what Daryl did to her, and without a doubt she's drawing her own conclusions and has her own feelings about them. But she's keeping them to herself.

What Beth chooses to do about it is something only Beth can decide. Right or wrong. And Beth owes her nothing.

It's been a long time since Carol was anyone's mother. Even his.

"He didn't," Beth says. Not a whisper. Low and solid. Not so difficult to say as she might have imagined. "He just bruised me. That's all."

Not saying it for her sake. There's nothing here about her that needs protecting. But across the street, presumably, Daryl is facing himself, and that'll mean that in his own way he's facing these bruises. Carol will finish up here, go back across the street and face _him,_ and even if thinking about it ties her gut in knots, Beth is damned if she's going to send Carol into that house under the assumption that the man waiting inside might be a rapist.

Though he would likely maintain that the line between _tried_ and _did_ is very fine indeed.

Bottom line: Daryl _needs_ Carol to be there with him. Fully. Maybe more than ever now.

Another couple beats of silence. Then Carol bends and soaks her cloth in the soapy water, shifting her gaze back to the floor. "Go see Denise, Beth. Don't make me tell you twice."

The floor is better. Ten more minutes and it's much better. Ten minutes after that and it's almost spotless, only a hint of a smear here and there in the grouting between the tile. The water in the bucket is a deeper pink, and Beth can't keep her eyes off it as she rises and carries it back down the hall. The sun is setting, and as Beth walks out onto the back porch it casts itself across the grass like a Midas spell, gold along the edges of the blades.

Always this way, gold.

She takes the steps one at a careful time and stands on the narrow square of pavement at the bottom, looking once more down at the bucket. Spots of white-pink foam standing out against the darker hue, almost a faded rose, and yet again she thinks about washing him off herself, crying as she watched him flowing away - and now she understands that not all of the crying was bad.

She never mourned him the way she should have. They were all denied what they and _he_ should have had, the grave and the words and the chance to say goodbye, to feel like he was genuinely resting - peaceful, however horrible the event that put him in the ground. But she felt it worse than any of them, and even now she's not certain why.

She never mourned him. She never let go. She held onto whatever she could grasp. His blood. His knife. Her memories of him - not the good ones. Not the good in him, not what he gave her. She held onto those final nightmare seconds in that nightmare hallway, tortured herself with them over and over: the explosion of blood as his head snapped back and he fell, her part in it, her hopeless guilt, kneeling beside him and cradling his bleeding head in her lap and more of his blood bathing her hands.

And the trunk. The obscenity of that fucking trunk.

 _Maybe I could've done something._

She never mourned him. But she watched him soaking into the ground, the grass and clover and the asters' purple stain in the midst of the green, and it was awful, but also, just in those few seconds…

He watered the earth. His blood and everything of life in it. He watered what was growing there, and she doesn't need to return to that place to know in her bones that it all kept on growing.

She takes a trembling breath and squeezes her eyes closed - then opens them, relaxes, lets the tears flow as she walks into the grass and slowly empties the bucket over the white clover and the nodding heads of dandelions.

The soap probably won't do them any favors. But there isn't much of that. There's far more of him.

She stands there with the bucket held loose in her hand and watches him sink into the soil.

Maybe she could have done something. Maybe she could have _not_ done something. Maybe she could have done nothing at all. Doesn't matter. What matters is that after, if she could have, she would have gotten this part right, and she would have done so even if all she had was his blood. There wouldn't just have been words, not from her, because words aren't what he asked her for. She would have given him the last thing he ever requested of her.

She doesn't know where she remembers the song from. But she does remember.

 _I know there is a land of beautiful flowers_  
 _where we'll meet again when life is over_  
 _where we'll while away the endless hours_  
 _on Heaven's bright eternal shore_

 _I want to meet you by that beautiful river_  
 _on that eternal morning in the sky_  
 _where we'll live in peace through endless ages_  
 _where we'll never say goodbye_

Very dimly, a part of her set very far back in her mind is aware of the back door opening and the quality of a silence in which someone is present - and watching her. Listening. And that's all right.

If Carol wants to carry this back across the street as well, she's more than welcome to it.

* * *

He's not going to bed in this fucking room.

For the second time in a day, he stands there in it and looks around. He hates it. He hates everything it's making him feel and everything it is, all its bad shadows and its wrong angles, its corners where he sees darkness swirling like noxious clouds, the bare bulb on the bedside table, the bare mattress on the bedframe, the remains of his nest in the corner. The thin, anemic light of the rising moon through the curtains.

He understands that he's always hated this room. Only now is he also understanding that he doesn't have to stay here. This is not something he _deserves._ It's not his place anymore to decide what he does or doesn't deserve. He's very bad at that. He should leave it to someone else, at least for a while.

He doesn't have to stay here. If he wants to, he can walk out of here and never set foot in this room again. If he wants to, he can have this small measure of freedom from himself.

 _I want it._

Silently, he goes about the business of collecting the things he considers _his._

There really is hardly anything. Mostly a few items of clothing and a toothbrush. He didn't care about _things._ He still doesn't. He already lost just about every _thing_ he ever gave a shit about. He lost his bike. He lost his bandanna. He lost his vest, his wings. He lost his bow. It's just him now.

Well. Not exactly. There's what Beth gave him, and what goes with it, which Carol brought back with her from across the street earlier, and now he lays a hand on it: hilt of his knife where it rests in its sheath at his belt.

Last night he took that knife when she offered it to him and he fed it blood, and he doesn't feel bad about it. He doesn't regret it. He sees the necessity of it. But he took no pleasure in any of it. He lost track of how many people he killed, surging through the firelit darkness like a vengeful ghost, but he didn't enjoy the killing the way he would have expected. There was no release. It wasn't _recreation_ in any sense of the word.

It was a job. It had to be done. He did it. Now it's over and he's washed the knife, washed himself, and life goes on and he goes on within it.

Can't go back.

He gathers what he has on the bed, takes a few more seconds to scan the space before returning his gaze to the little pile of his possessions. One thing he grabbed without stopping to consider, but he considers it now, bending and picking it up and turning it over in his hands.

His fingers. He's bitten them today, yes. Bitten and chewed and picked at the ragged ends. But it's better. And anyway he doesn't pay them any mind. He's focused entirely on what he's holding.

 _The Stranger_

He thumbs it open, flips through. His attention stops at a passage he's read before, but somehow his brain latches onto a sequence of words and rips them free of their context, erases everything else around them and allows them to sit alone on a blank page.

 _For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again._

He closes the book, drops it on the bed, and leaves it there.

Movement in the corner of his vision as he scoops the rest of it up and turns toward the door. He looks back - and freezes.

It's there. Crouched under the window, bathed in moonlight that turns it not pale white but instead a deep and malevolent red. Its scabby eyeless face, its bloody tongue lolling between an equally bloody set of razor-blade teeth, its needle-claws oozing poison and clicking as its long bony fingers twitch on the floor. Hanging flaps of decaying skin. Maggots wriggling in its open oozing sores. Flies.

 _You pathetic little moron. You stupid worthless piece of shit. You honestly think you can get away from this? From me?_

 _From you?_

He looks at it for a long time. He doesn't shudder or cringe, and he doesn't look away. He's not going to be the first one to blink. Eyes or no eyes.

He's also not going to lie to himself.

"No," he says softly, finally, and turns away.

He steps out into the empty hallway and shuts the door behind him with a soft click.

* * *

He could bed down any number of places. But he gently shrugs off Rick and Michonne and Carol and returns to the back yard, sets everything down in the grass. It's another clear night, though the stench of burning flesh lingers faintly in the air. He's smelled worse and it doesn't bother him.

All those nights on the road and beside the road and off the road, he never slept in the open. It wasn't just a matter of safety; open sky was a horror, even with the moon. Shadows were best. Under the cover of trees and outcroppings, bridges, abandoned buildings - though not cars. Never cars. Regardless, day or night, he found his own versions of caves to bed down in. He abhorred the sky.

Now he looks up at it, and his head hurts but it's not that bad. He can bear it. He thinks he can sleep without the pills. At any rate, he'll try.

Out here under the open sky is good for now.

Tomorrow he'll find out what comes next.

* * *

She's in the clinic, mid-morning, when Maggie and Glenn come back.

Denise - looking like she hasn't slept more than a few hours since the attack, which is probably accurate - approached her without comment when she came in, ushered her over to a seat by the window and started examining her bruises and scrapes. Her throat, too, and when Denise touched her chin and lifted her head to get a better view, brief tension gripped her.

But Denise didn't ask. And sure, it could have been the Wolves. Any of her injuries could be chalked up to them.

No sense in thinking too much about it.

Beth murmured something about her head. Denise got a penlight, shone it into her eyes, made a bit of a face and shrugged. Asked her to try to walk a straight line. Started to ask her the date - then stopped and laughed a little. A question like that is pointless. No one knows the date anymore.

How does she _feel?_ Beth returned the shrug. Tired. Beaten up. Her tailbone and ribs throbbed from where the Wolf knocked her down - not just the Wolf, but whatever. She felt numb, kind of, which she guessed was a species of shock. Probably doesn't matter how much shit you see and how used to it you think you are. You still have cracks. Sometimes those cracks actually get wider. She's walking around with a lot of scar tissue, and scar tissue isn't always tougher than before. Doesn't always protect so well. The attack hurt her, and it hurt her in more than one way.

Pause. Quiet.

Her gaze flicked from Denise's down to her wrist and back again. Denise has seen him, right _?_

Denise hesitated. Nodded. He's all right. He's very all right, actually.

"He wants to get better." Another little smile, soft. Weary but warm. "He wants to try medication. He wants to try actual therapy _._ He wants to try _anything_ if it might help him. He just wants to get better."

So he believes it's possible.

The therapy… How does that work, exactly? She's talking to him?

Kind of. He talks to her. They talk together. The idea is that they look at problems, think about how to deal with them. It's about strategy. It's also about keeping the possibility in front of him like a beacon, keeping him focused on it: he _can_ get better. Steps forward should be celebrated. Steps backward aren't the end of everything. What matters is that he keeps moving.

Beth lowered her head and looked at her hands. Focused on breathing. She doesn't bite her fingers bloody, doesn't strip off skin and scabs, but her hands are deeply calloused now, scarred on the knuckles and backs, tough in a way the farm never made them. He was trying to destroy what tied him to the world, what he was terrified might betray him in the worst possible fashion. She understands that it wasn't that planned or that intentional - that when he said _it felt bad_ when he didn't, he was talking about something much more fundamentally physical in the new structure of his brain - but it was part of it. His fear of himself. His conviction of his own violent monstrosity. He was never truly as bad as he believed. But he was bad. Parts of him still have to be. He wasn't wrong. He _isn't_ wrong.

She's not well either. She hasn't been well for a long time. There was losing him, there was getting him back, there's everything that happened since - the things he meant to do to her and the things he didn't - but it began for her even before that. It began even before the prison. And for better or worse, she's always made it her business to take care of other people.

Could be it's time for her to take care of herself.

She caught Denise's gaze again. Held it. Took another deep breath, and it was steady.

"Think I could do it too? Talk to you, I mean? Just… Just sometimes?"

This time Denise's smile wasn't tiny. And just then came the grating metallic sound of the gates opening and the rumble of an engine accompanied by voices, and Beth was up and across the room and pulling the door open before Denise could say anything else.

It's not like she really needed an answer. The smile was more than enough.

* * *

Maggie's face is pinched, worried, scanning everywhere as she stands by the car, hand frozen in the act of sweeping her dark hair back from her face. It unfreezes when she sees Beth coming toward her and she's opening her mouth to speak, but then Beth's arms are around her and squeezing her so tight she releases a surprised little _oof_. Second or two of that surprise lingering, but it doesn't go for longer than that; she's hugging Beth back, holding on, and the tender ache when she cups the back of Beth's head is easily ignored.

Beth did this at the prison, more than once, in the days before she stopped crying. People left on runs. People came back. Every time they did, it was a small miracle. It was worth clinging to them, if only for a moment, because the chance might not come again.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped believing in miracles. Things merely happened. There was no reason for it, and it didn't mean anything. But against every single odd he's alive, and people have died, but most of them made it. Most of them are still here. When Rick and Aaron led him through the gates, there was one more than there had been. Every day that's true is another small miracle, and it doesn't require a reason or some kind of externally bestowed meaning in order to be one.

It simply is.

"I'm alright," she murmurs, raises her head and sees Glenn and smiles shakily at him. "I'm alright."

 _We are._


	45. life is real only when I am

**Note:** Last three chapters (for real; the final chapter is written). This and the next one were in fact originally one chapter, but it got so goddamn long that it felt like it worked better broken up.

Thank you so much, guys. Almost done. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 45: life is real only when I am**

 _Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow flat on the wall. The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs. You had not expected this, the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light pummeling you in a stream of fists._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

"You can't just stay outside."

He glances at Rick. Rick looks more than a little bothered. He doesn't blame Rick for that, but he doesn't share Rick's feelings. Things like this aren't bothering him at the moment, not because nothing is bothering him but because significantly larger things are. Like the chemicals he's going to start putting into his body in the next few days and what they might do to him, and the fact Denise has explained how not all of those things are good. Like the perverse fact that forward movement along these lines manages to feel worse in some ways than an utterly awful status quo. Like the fact that he's fucking terrified of it, of failing, of discovering that Denise is wrong and Rick is wrong and Beth is wrong and he actually _can't_ get better.

Of letting them all down.

In the meantime he's sitting on the back steps and gazing out at his small camp in the grass, protected from the sun of late afternoon, and holding a cigarette between his fingers.

It's not lit. He's not sure he actually wants to light it. His throat still feels raw, his voice is still coming in a low croak, and while the nicotine is extremely attractive, this specific delivery system is decidedly not. Not at the moment.

Might not be terrible for him if he cuts back anyway. The bitter irony of surviving a bullet to the head only to die of something as stupidly mundane as lung cancer.

Not that something else isn't likely to kill him before that.

Then it hits him: he gives a shit.

Anyway. "Why can't I?"

Another glance; Rick still looks bothered but now also slightly amused. "Well, for one thing eventually it's gonna rain."

He grunts. "Little rain never killed no one." Then, before Rick can respond, "I ain't never goin' back in there."

"You don't have to. There's the couch. Least until we figure out something else."

"Thought Carol slept there."

"Daryl," Rick says gently. "Carol doesn't live here."

He looks up sharply - yet although he's startled by this information, it feels like something he should already have gleaned from the world in general. Like maybe something he had already figured out and forgotten or dismissed as insignificant. She's never seemed _settled_ there on that couch, the times he's been up and moving around in the night and seen her. It's never seemed permanent. Never seemed like she's been there for a while.

"Huh?"

"She started staying here when you showed up. To help you." Hand on his shoulder - only brief, and he feels only the tiniest twinge of instinctive resentment over it. "You shouldn't feel bad about it or anything. She wanted to. She wanted to be close to you. But if you think she can leave now and it won't make things worse for you…" Rick shrugs, smiles faintly. "Couch is all yours. She says it's pretty comfy."

He looks away, frowning. Ruminating. Yes, this should make him feel bad. More than bad, more than several different varieties of guilty; it should make him feel _angry._ Angry at them for just assuming what he'll want or need, assuming they know what's _best for him_ , and angry at himself because he should be stronger than this, he shouldn't need her like he does, because he _does._ Shouldn't feel so much better when she's with him, shouldn't let her be one of the few people who can touch him without him wanting to kill them every time, shouldn't _give a shit._ His weakness, the ugly weakness in needing anyone that way. Like he's a kid and he needs a fucking mom.

Like they assume they know what's best for him, and occasionally they have the audacity to be right.

He should feel all of that. And he does, way in the back of his mind somewhere. But it's muted, as if there's a couple of doors between him and the tantrum. Clearly he shouldn't depend on that always being the case, but for the moment he's not going to question it.

He can't stop a seizure. But like the storms in his head, he can weather it.

And yeah, eventually it'll rain.

"She can leave," he murmurs, and he raises his hand and flicks the cigarette away into the grass, tiny white projectile flying end over end through the air and lost in the green.

* * *

The couch is pretty comfy. Or it will be.

The corners of the room are quiet and empty. The walls are solid and don't admit gaping holes that bleed black. He can't get away from himself, no. But falling asleep - too tired to even be kept awake by the unsettling softness beneath him - he thinks that sometimes he's someone he can deal with.

It's not like he can be anyone else.

* * *

So now: Days.

* * *

First round.

She lays them out on the dining table in front of him - in the bottles and also the actual pills, and he glances up at the doorway and hopes almost viciously that no one comes in and sees this, because… Christ, he doesn't fucking know why. It just feels shitty. It feels shitty that he's _reduced_ to this. It feels shitty that he has no idea why he associates it with the concept of _reduction_ when he's been barely hanging on by his chewed fingernails so far, and what Denise is presenting him with is the possibility of _getting better._

For a while, the corners of the room hiss. Mouths in the walls opening, expressionless but somehow jeering. He tries not to look. Tries to focus on what she's saying to him about what they are and what they're for. What he might experience. He tries so fucking _hard._

Long names he doesn't retain. Shorter brand names he doesn't retain either. This one larger and white: his anger and his depression. This one smaller and pale orange: the hallucinations. This one, also pale orange and somewhere in between the other two in terms of size: what he does to his hands and skin. Speaking of his hands and skin, yes, that's getting to be a problem again. The burns are healing but that means they're beginning to scab over and they _itch_ and the urge to peel the scabs away is almost unbearable. It _is_ unbearable. He's been doing it. Trying not to do it a lot but he's been doing it all the same.

It's unspeakably satisfying. Red well of blood and how sweet it tastes, jelly-like when it congeals. He does it and he stares at the wall and the floor and is disgusted with himself.

This is what he wants to stop being, and what if he can't, and in fact she _told_ him he probably won't be able to stop completely, at least not all of it, or it might pop up in other ways, ways he doesn't expect.

His brain is still his enemy. His fucking father in his head, looking for all kinds of ways to make him hurt.

God, please let this help. Please please please. God isn't real, the world is gently indifferent to him and there's no one to ask for a favor but he silently implores it anyway - a massive generalized _Whatever._ Looking at the pills and thinking _Oh my God please God please let this work because I still can't stop thinking about that fucking gun and I don't know how much more I can take._

Got a huge reprieve but a reprieve is all it feels like. He bought himself some time.

No. Beth bought it for him. She paid the fucking price and he hasn't seen her since then but in his dreams he's lying in her lap with the muzzle of the gun against his head and he's looking up at her dark collar of bruises very visible in the moonlight and he's begging her to _do it_ because he's not strong enough and if he's capable of what he did to her than it has to be done. You can't let a rabid dog live no matter how much you love it. Maybe it doesn't want to bite anyone but sooner or later it will.

Sooner or later he will.

Waking up with the pillow and the blanket and the couch beneath him soaked. Sweat and tears. Wondering if he was screaming but lying there in the dark and listening and the house is mercifully silent.

 _So while we're at it, please let her be sleeping better than I am. Please let her not be tortured by this. Please let her be able to forget it. Only one of us should suffer for it._

Broken mind wandering again, wandering the dim and ever-shifting maze of itself.

 _Shit._

Denise quiet. At some point she stopped talking. Looking at him now, softly expectant. If he asks her to repeat any of it, she'll know he wasn't able to focus.

Just once, he would like to be able to have a semi-normal interaction with someone that extends for a period longer than five fucking minutes.

"It's okay," she says, soft as her manner, and he presses his palms against the table and lowers his head and drags in a shuddering breath.

"Ain't."

"It is. All you have to do is try." She's gathering up the pills now, popping them back into their bottles. "Try, but stop trying to do it all at once. You won't be able to and it'll just mess you up worse. Okay?"

Hesitation. Nod. The fuck is he going to do, say no? Where does that leave him? Same damn place as before. And he doesn't like it here.

Okay. Hands spread on the tabletop. Breathing, calm.

All right.

* * *

He doesn't explain why he doesn't want to see her. He doesn't explain why he's put himself in this odd kind of seclusion. Fortunately they don't ask. Fortunately Denise doesn't bring it up. He doesn't know what the fuck he would say. It isn't exactly the cliched elephant in the cliched room, but it might become so.

On Beth's end… He doesn't know what she's said to them about why. But the truth is - and this sounds callous when he articulates it silently to himself but it's still _true_ \- that part is not his problem.

He's more than enough of a problem to keep himself occupied.

He wonders how he'll even know that he's getting better. He has no frame of reference for _better_ other than the absence of pain, and he suspects that if it happens, it'll be more complicated than that.

In the meantime it feels like a goddamn waiting game, because that's precisely what it is.

He avoids the front porch. He avoids the whole damn front of the place. He tends to confine himself to the grassy back. But there are times when he catches a glimpse of her house, going by a window or whatever, and he lingers for longer than he means to. Looks for longer than he wants. Doesn't see her, and thank Christ for that.

Probably.

But he thinks about crossing that river of pavement in the dark and the moonlight, traveling silently through the shadows to her window and watching her there. _Keeping_ watch. Like he did, when it was just them. Verifying her safety for himself and making sure she stays that way.

It wouldn't be like that, though. It wouldn't be like it was when it was just them. He's insane but that doesn't mean he's not self-aware. It would be creepy as fuck if he did that. It would be wrong. It would be _bad_. It would be such a violation. In its quiet way, it would be unspeakably horrible.

He doesn't want to see her. He isn't ready. And seeing her now… He can't predict how much it would hurt, only that it would. It's better that he doesn't, regardless of the hows or whys.

But he can picture her as he hopes she is. Peaceful. Sleeping deeply, unmolested by nightmares. Moonlight caressing her hair and face the way he wishes he could. Because he loves her so much, and he wants to _show her._

That's what he's doing.

That's the point.

* * *

The first time, it takes her a while to get going.

Sitting on a stretch of grass near the garden, she starts with him. She starts with him because that's their primary point of commonality, their first and still strongest connection. Denise already knows most of the worst of it but - haltingly - more detail emerges, the facts of what came after, how it felt and how it was. The wretchedness that permeated everything. How it seemed like there was no beauty in it. There was nothing redeeming. There was no funeral, no memorial, no words of remembrance. She knew at the time that it was because no one could bear to. No one could speak up. Then they were running and it was days and weeks later, and Tyreese died, and it started to be at once so immediate and so horribly distant, and there were times - times that crushed her in every conceivable way - where she would wake up and be certain it was only a bad dream.

Had to be. It was so unreal.

But each time, she reentered a world without him. And she had to face it all over again.

She expects that perhaps they'll just continue from there, cover what's happened since he arrived. But instead Denise begins to herd her gently backward, further and further, until she's talking about the prison and Daddy and what happened when they weren't there anymore, how it was, how she got so angry at Daryl afterward because she knew _exactly_ what he was feeling.

Or close enough.

She was so tired of losing people and it was never going to end. Eventually she would lose everyone and she would be all alone.

Not _him,_ no. Even broken, he was solid. Sure. He was made for how the world had become. Of course she would go before he did. Of course he would outlast her.

Comforting. She wouldn't have to be alone, then. But she said it and part of her knew immediately that it was cruel and it hurt him, that the thought of being alone tormented him even more than her.

And what if he _wouldn't_ last? Daddy was supposed to last. Not forever, of course not that, but he was supposed to keep going for a few more years at least. Good years. He would live with them and maybe it wouldn't always be easy, but mostly it would be happy. He was so strong. He survived tending to everyone who was sick. He survived losing his fucking _leg._ He could survive anything.

But then all at once he was gone.

And before that it was her mother. Her brother. Her goddamn boyfriend. _Two_ boyfriends. Everyone leaves her. One by one, she loses them. Lost Tyreese. Lost Maggie, for a while. Won't she lose her again at some point, this time for good? Glenn. Carol and Michonne and Rick. Sasha. Even Carl. Even Judith. She'll lose them all, and because she's cursed with the strength of her father, she alone will survive.

Last girl standing.

Then she'll be gone and that'll be the end of it.

How does that make her feel?

Shrug. She plucks some grass, rubs the blades between her fingers until the nails and pads are stained green. Thing is, even if it went down like that - which she frankly doubts - the idea doesn't horrify her the way it used to. It actually stopped horrifying her after a certain point but it wasn't because she came to terms with it. It was because she stopped feeling anything about it. It was because she didn't cry anymore. Out there on that road, nothing mattered. He was gone. He wasn't the center of it, he wasn't the linchpin of her entire world, but when she watched the back and top of his head blow outward in a thick spray of blood, it started a gradual and escalating series of collapses that continued long after they left him behind. He was the little rockfall that started the avalanche.

Well. Not that his death was little. Thin smile. It was one of the worst things that's ever happened to her. Worse than Daddy in some ways, because Daddy wasn't her fault. She couldn't have done anything to stop that. With Daryl, she sees a single choice that she made, and if she had chosen differently, that gun would likely have never gone off. He wouldn't have been in the path of that bullet. He wouldn't have suffered so terribly for so long. He wouldn't be so broken now.

She might still be broken, but she wouldn't be broken as badly as she is.

She still thinks of it as _his death?_

She doesn't know how else to think of it. That's what it felt like. That's what it _still_ feels like. The man who was out there with only her, that man is gone. Parts of him remain, maybe large ones, but they're just partial. What exists now, wearing his face, is someone new.

When she thinks about that choice, the one she could have made differently, how does _that_ make her feel?

Long pause. She raises her head and looks at the wall. From here she can see some of those names. More names than there were. Lost them too. She wasn't particularly close to any of them, but she knew each one. In a place this small, you know everyone.

She can't go back. She can't make that choice differently. It exists in that endless land of the dead that is _the Past._ All she can do is bury it and move on.

Will she?

She doesn't know. She wants to. She laughs softly. She wants to do all kinds of things, and that doesn't mean they happen.

She points to the wall. He asked her to put his name on it. She shoots Denise a glance but can't quite read what she sees there. He said he kept forgetting himself. Sometimes even his own name. In that moment, he wanted to be remembered. He wanted _her_ to remember him.

She thought it meant that he was contemplating his future death. That on some level he was already planning the ways in which he could make himself die. But now she's not completely certain that's all he meant.

No?

No. Because she's not the only one who needs to let go. Bury the dead. Move on.

When she finally talks to him again, she's going to ask him. She's going to ask if he still feels that way. If he still wants it. If he does, she'll put his name there with the others.

He won't be forgotten. Until there's no one left to remember.

* * *

The things he sees fade. Become less frequent. But he sleeps too much and too deeply. Feels half asleep some of the time he's awake. Sluggish. Doesn't like it. For a couple of days he fights with himself about it, because the walls don't bleed and nothing burns outside and he feels safer, but he hates the other thing it's doing to him. Is the trade-off worth it? Can he live with this?

He finally caves and tells her about it.

Well, okay. Yeah, that's not totally unexpected. It happens. They can try something else.

He asks - snappishly - if any of these are absent the potential to fuck him up. She says no.

Groan. Wonderful. He rakes his hands through his hair, sighs.

Thing is, he's fucked up anyway. So.

* * *

The thing for his hands likely won't start working for a couple of weeks. Assuming, naturally, that it works at all. Sometimes he stares down at what he's doing to himself despite his best efforts not to and he wants to weep with frustration and shame.

Sometimes he does.

At least he can.

* * *

But there's a full day where he doesn't at any point feel so angry. Irritable, sure. But he gets through it. It doesn't feel like an unstoppable typhoon of rage. It feels like he's in a moderately bad mood.

Annoyed with Rick for some stupid fucking thing he doesn't even recall later, standing in the upstairs hallway and leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed and counting out the duration of his breaths. That's something Denise said to use. Try. Focus on the air. Count. In one-two-three, hold one-two-three, out one-two-three until he feels his heart slowing down.

It does work. So far it does.

* * *

Talking to her every day: mixed. Sometimes he feels a desire for it so intense it alarms him. Sometimes he would rather do just about anything else.

He unloads poison on her, gallons of it. Not because he wants to repulse her but because she tells him that's what he needs to try to do. She is his confessional. The cops at Grady. That it felt good. Felt good to kill them. Felt good in ways he's still not sure what to make of and can barely stand to think about anyway - yet he can't stop thinking about it. It torments him, one thing among myriad others. How it felt…

He never cared very much about sex, never especially wanted or enjoyed it, but as he remembers it, doing that felt a little like what people say sex is. Surge of energy. Every synapse afire. Power.

Finally he wasn't weak anymore.

Wasn't the last time. There were other times. He's not sure how many. He could have scavenged or fashioned weapons but by choice he often killed with his bare hands. His teeth. Fucking hell, his _teeth,_ and he sits with his head hanging almost between his knees, jaw clenched as he knots his hair around his fingers, because what _is_ he? What the fuck kind of person _does_ that?

But he knows. That world out there. That's what it does to you if you let it. If you can't make it stop.

What is he? He's not evil. That's the first thing, she says. Does he know that? He should. He's not a monster. People adapt to their circumstances. Human beings are so incredibly adaptable; it's one of the wonderful things about them. It's one of the reasons why anyone survives now. But sometimes that adaptability expresses itself in horrible ways, if the circumstances themselves are horrible.

He was out there, alone and very sick, for six hundred miles. Maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to him, but in the worst possible way, his brain was probably just trying to keep him alive.

With that much cruelty?

Yes. Because the horrors inside him had to go somewhere or they would rip him apart.

He hates this. Voice muffled, face in his hands. He hates it, he hates himself. He hates what his _circumstances_ have forced him to become. If that's even true.

Okay. But does he understand that he's the only one here who feels that way? No one else hates him. Not like he does.

Yeah, well. They don't _know._

Possibly he should give them a little more credit. Was he with them on the trip up here? No? Have they told him a lot about it? No?

Then how does he know what _they_ had to do to survive?

He's not a special snowflake when it comes to _fucked up_ , does he get that? Rick - She doesn't know him that well and it's not like he's ever come to really talk to her or anything, but Christ, she knows enough just from watching him and she can only imagine what the inside of his head looks like. And honestly doesn't much care to.

Would have made him angry before. Kind of does. But more, it's funny to him, at least a little. He gives her a small smile - thin but it's there. So why is she hanging out with _him,_ then?

Because. No one should have to live in there alone.

Plus there's the thing where she likes him.

* * *

For a while the headaches are better. Then they get bad again. For a while they're worse than they've ever been. They blind him, deafen him, enclose him in a world of pain from which he can't escape no matter what he does. He snarls at anyone who tries to help him, snaps at Rick like a feral dog. He's mortified when he realizes what he's done, but it doesn't stop him from doing it next time. And at times he actually misses that fucking room, its dimness, and he finds himself lying on the couch with a pillow over his head and whimpering and physically restraining himself from getting up and going back in there. Curling in the corner and…

Giving up.

He thinks about a drunk trying to not be a drunk anymore, considering the bottle of booze in the cabinet nearby. Considering it very carefully.

No.

The pills he takes for it still help, kind of. But not enough. So Denise is sitting with him as the stormclouds begin to clear and she suggests two things.

Pot, and sunglasses.

It hurts so fucking much, but he laughs for a full three minutes. When she tells him she's not at all kidding, he just laughs harder.

This is absurd. Every part of it is constructed from pure grade-A absurdity. He can get fucked up over that - fucked up even worse than he is - or he can simply laugh at it.

He's really tired of the former. So the latter it is.

Pot - seeds or the plant, they'd need their own supply - might take a while to find. But okay. Sure, fine. Before he got this desperate he would have said no way, but he _is_ desperate, very, and anyway she's a _doctor,_ right? Or the closest they have? Might as well be? That makes it _medicinal,_ right? Wouldn't Merle get a kick out of _this_.

He doesn't even know why he's laughing anymore. He just knows he is.

It's all right.

* * *

The first time she got really fucked up was when Daddy convinced her that Mama and Shawn could get better.

She believed him because she wanted to. She needed to. It was something to cling to, made it something she could bear without it pulverizing her. Seeing them like that, knowing that if she let them get too close they would try to kill her. _Eat_ her. That's not what happens when people get sick. When people get sick they go to bed with Tylenol and hot water bottles, they drink lots of fluids and you bring them chicken soup. They take vitamin C and they get cranky. Worst case scenario, they go to the hospital, but the bottom line is that you can _be with them._ You can sit with them, talk to them if it makes them feel better. Read to them, watch stupid movies, play board games in bed if they feel up to it. You can hold their hand, touch their face. You can hug them. Maybe you get sick too, but that's all right.

When you love someone, that's just part of the package.

She believed Daddy because seeing them both like that and keeping a distance like they were rabid animals - it was too horrible. She thought they were in so much pain. They were _falling apart;_ how could that _not_ hurt? What if they were scared? What if they didn't understand why their family had suddenly abandoned them and locked them in a goddamn _barn?_

She believed they didn't want to hurt her. She believed they could get better. She believed they could come back.

Then she watched Daryl and Rick and the others shoot them in the head.

She hated Daddy for it, for a while. She hated him and she hated herself for hating him and that endless loop of hatred, that poisonous snake swallowing its own tail, that's part of why she wanted to _go._ Even much later, she looked back on that girl with contempt. There's faith and then there's naive stupidity.

And then, after, she stopped drawing a line between those two things at all.

She leans over her knees, drags her fingers through her hair - and winces. She forgot it was tied back and it stings as she pulls strands loose. Sitting in her kitchen, cups of tea - domestic as you please, but her tea is cold. She hasn't touched it. The smell of chamomile is anything but soothing. She should have known better.

 _I was hurtin' you. I swear to fuckin' God, Beth, I don't want to, I don't wanna do that, I won't, I swear I won't. Fuck, I swear I never will._

He did. She says it dully - two words that numb her lips and tongue like Novocaine. He hurt her. More than once. Just like with Mama and Shawn, just like so many times since then, she wanted to believe it would be all right. She wanted to believe he never would. She wanted to believe he could get better, that he could come back. And yeah, those last two things are still possible in some form. She believes they're happening already. But he swore that he would never hurt her, and she wanted to believe it, and she got too close and he did.

He hurt her so bad.

* * *

The heavy gray takes him.

He feels it coming as the sullen rumble of thunder, clouds on the horizon - but not a storm. Just the clouds, thick and oppressive, suffocating him. Fog. The last time it came for him he went to _her,_ and he stands on the porch and looks across the street at her house and it's hard to breathe.

Denise isn't here. She was already here. He won't see her until tomorrow. He could go to her but even moving is suddenly so hard. He doesn't even know who's in the house. It occurs to him that he might be alone in here, and that if that's the case, he's alone in a house full of sharp objects, glass and knives - fuck, he has his own knife if nothing else - and it would be easy.

God, it would be so easy.

He doesn't even want to. But sitting on the couch and staring at nothing, he doesn't want to do anything else. He's struggling to move, as if something is sitting on his chest, or coiling around him like a boa constrictor. Squeezing the life out of him. Everything is flat, everything is ten steps removed, and he only feels a dense sickening _ache_ and the conviction that this time he doesn't get to come out of it. This time, this is all he has forever, all he'll ever be capable of feeling.

Maybe the medication isn't working after all.

Maybe the medication has broken him beyond repair.

But he's not numb. It would be so much better if he could be numb. What he feels churning in his gut is a species of despairing panic, a weak jittering like a bad nicotine high. He doesn't know if he can take another ten minutes of this, let alone ten hours. Ten days. Weeks.

Holy Christ, ten years.

He's circling a drain, a downward spiral. He squeezes his eyes shut and it goes around and around - Denise's sad, confused face as she tells him that she's at a loss, she doesn't know what to do for him and she suspects there's nothing she can do at all. Nothing to be done. Rick's increasing impatience with him; yeah, it was one thing when there was the possibility of progress, but now they're all going to just have to _put up with this_ for the rest of whatever? Seriously? Michonne, the same. Carol stops bothering with him, because she doesn't have time for something she can't fix. Maggie and Glenn… Well, it's just not comfortable being around him. Even Glenn, backing away from him. Can't he cheer the fuck up already?

He doesn't get to see _her_ again. He's no good for her and she knows it. There are only so many times she can deal with him. Only so many times she can hold him while he tries to hang on.

He ends up by himself in an empty room. Everyone else moves on with their lives. They shut the lid on him and leave him behind in the gray fog.

He lifts his head and opens his eyes to find that he's sitting on the kitchen floor, back against one of the cabinets with his knees drawn up against his chest - but he only identifies his surroundings by the vague blurs he can make out through his tears. His throat is raw and he guesses it's from weeping. His face is a mess of tears and snot and he wipes at himself with the back of his hand and it doesn't help.

Figure in the doorway and he stares at it in a kind of vaguely resigned terror. No, he can't get away. That figure, the rusty grin he can't see yet but he knows is there. Sooner or later it comes for him. He won't be alone, actually, when the rest of them go.

This thing will be pleased to keep him company.

Moving. Coming toward him. He watches it, watches it clarifying and taking on sharper form, and as a fresh round of shuddering seizes his frame, it crouches in front of him. Looks at him.

The cool, keen eyes of the Boy.

No. _Carl._ His name is Carl.

Carl would probably be the most pleased to let him be alone. Or not pleased, necessarily, but he would regard it as a relief. So why the fuck is he here now? Tries to ask; only sobs again. God, just _go away._ It's better. It's better if no one sees him like this. It was better when he was sure he was alone.

But Carl turns and sinks down next to him.

A few surreal seconds, and then the even more surreal weight of a hand on his shoulder.

No words. Just that hand, unmoving. Then a gentle squeeze, and he lowers his head to rest on his knees, hugs them tight, and simply keeps crying. The thing is, everything is the tiniest bit clearer and brighter, and he can take the tiniest bit more of a breath, and it feels better. A little.

It _is_ better.

Carl doesn't leave him behind.

* * *

"He tried to rape me."

She simply lets it lie there between them for a moment or two. There is nothing immediately to add. It stands on its own, and she watches Denise taking the words in and turning them over in her mental hands, and what she notices first and foremost is that Denise doesn't look at all surprised.

Profoundly uneasy, yes. Grave. But not surprised.

"The night the Wolves attacked. I found him in the garage. Aaron and Eric's place, you know?" She sighs and looks down at her hands where they lie slightly curled in her lap. They're doing this in her bedroom this time, sitting face to face on her bed, and as with the chamomile, she's now wondering how good an idea this was.

Except maybe it was. Not _good,_ exactly. But right. This is not where he tried to do that to her. This is where love was made.

She fingers the edge of the sheet and she remembers the gentle, desperate care in his torn hands when he touched her. When he moved inside her.

Showed her that he loved her.

"He was leavin'. He asked me to go with him. I said no. I knew…" She pulls in a hard breath. "I knew it wouldn't be safe. For me. For him. He wouldn't _want_ to hurt me, but he would. There was somethin' bad in him. I could see it in his eyes."

Nothing from Denise. She merely sits there in silence. It's easy to discern what she's doing: allowing space. Beth needs no prompting here. Should have none.

Right now it's hard to feel much of anything, but she supposes she's grateful.

Afternoon sun spilling across the bed. Once again all gold. Lovely. Since she said goodbye to him, it's been lovely day after lovely day, as if the world has finally determined to be kind to them. But it's a bit late for that.

"I wanted to say yes. But I said no. And he just… He lost it. Got me up against the wall, and he…" She gazes up at the window, the ceiling, biting her lip; her voice is trembling and her throat is closing up and the corners of her eyes are stinging, and it's not fair that she should feel so little and still be about to cry. "It was like he wasn't even there anymore. I looked at him and what I saw… It was him. But it wasn't. I'm not makin' excuses for him, and he says he remembers it and he knew what he was doin', but I… I saw somethin' happen to him. I _saw_ it. It was like that badness in him rose up and it took him away. All of him."

Another long pause. She can't look at Denise. She doesn't want to. She doesn't want to look at anything. She doesn't want to be here.

"I fought him off. I saw him _come back._ Then he ran and I ran after him, I found him in the woods… He asked me to kill him. Begged me." She swallows. She barely can. "He said it had to be me. He said he wasn't strong enough."

"You didn't," Denise says softly, and that's all.

"No. I didn't." She clumsily wipes at her face with one hand, finally manages to meet Denise's eyes. It happened. It happened, and they can't go back. He can't make a different choice. And sure, she can forgive him and they can bury it, but that doesn't mean they can forget.

She won't ever forget. And it probably won't ever stop hurting.

Same for him.

Her smile, when it comes, is shaky and utterly devoid of humor. But it's a smile all the same. They don't get to come back. But it's possible that they get to move forward. "I didn't," she repeats. "After what he did… I wasn't gonna let him off that easy."

It wasn't mercy. She understands that. Understood it at the time. Mercy would have been to squeeze the trigger and make it stop. She refused him that.

She condemned him.

* * *

"I tried to rape her."

First time he's said it aloud, even to himself. He stares blankly at the wall, all lit up in the bright noonday sun. There it is. What he did, in the simplest possible terms. What he did, which he can't hide from. Should never be allowed to hide from.

He has to say it. He has to look it in the face and not be the first one to blink.

"I know," Denise says softly, and he glances over at her where she sits beside him on the front steps, and he knows it's true and he's not in the least astonished.

Either Beth told her, or she already just knew.

"I don't…" He can't finish it. He looks down at his hands. He's pulled the cuticle of his left thumb back so deep that blood is welling and circling his ragged nail. And then he realizes why he can't speak, why all he could manage were those five words: he doesn't feel as though he has the _right_ to speak about it, beyond confession. He's the one who _did it._ His feelings about it are, to a significant degree, unimportant. He can't undo it if he suffers enough. He can't undo it if he's sufficiently sorry for it. He did it. It's part of him now.

It's part of her.

"I love her," he whispers. He can say truths. That's all. No rationalizing. No navel-gazing. No _I didn't want to_ or _I couldn't stop._ Nothing that gets within a hundred fucking miles of a justification or an excuse.

He tried to rape her, and he loves her.

"I know."

"I don't know what to do." And again, he halts there. There's no room to entertain possibilities or options. This isn't a means to an end or the beginning of another stage in the conversation. It's merely yet another truth. He doesn't know what to do - and he doesn't have the luxury of doing nothing. When she hurled the gun into the dark, she didn't leave that choice open to him. That final act was her taking it away.

He has to keep living. So he has to find a way to live with this. Whatever that ends up meaning.

 _I don't know what to do._

For now, that's all.

* * *

She doesn't dream about killing him anymore. That doesn't mean she doesn't have nightmares.

In her nightmares, now, he's killing her. He's killing her in all sorts of ways. He's killing her with knives, with a gun, with his bow. He's killing her with his bare hands and with his teeth. She feels the sharp ache in her jaw as he hauls it open, forces the barrel of the gun between her teeth. She feels the slippery tangle of her intestines against her upper thighs as he guts her. She feels the impact of the bolt as it punches through her sternum or between her ribs. She feels the warm rush of blood down her shoulder and side as he bites her throat open. She feels his fist slam into her face over and over, the crunch as her nose crumples and her cheekbone shatters, as her jaw dislocates and her eye socket caves in. She feels - God, she feels so vividly, feels it like a memory because it _is_ \- her chest seize and her eyes bulge as he closes his hands around her throat and squeezes.

She feels the grind of the bones in her wrists as he holds her down and the wrenching burn as he forces her legs apart and drives into her. Impales her with himself, ruthless, eyes glowing with hate. He rips her open wider with every cruel snap of his hips, and he swallows her screams and makes her lips bleed.

He wants to destroy her. Because she refused to destroy him.

She always wakes up in silence. Those dream-cries never make it into the real world. She's breathing in shallow pulls and staring at the ceiling, tear-blind in the dark or the colorless light before dawn. She's shivering and clammy with sweat, and her throat and wrist are aching even though the bruises are long faded.

She forgave him. She did. She never could have done anything else, and it wasn't weakness to do so. She loves him in ways she doesn't yet fully understand. She _will_ see him again, and they'll take whatever is between them in their joined hands and see what they can make of it.

But here in the dark she hates him. She hates him for what he did to her and to himself and to _them,_ for how he took what they did together in this bed and he soaked it in the worst of his disease. It's better now, but it's still true, and she knows he's sorry for it and always will be but she hates him so _much._

Because she loves him so much. Because this is something she wants to fight for. It would be easier to hate him and never forgive him and leave it at that.

Just like it would be easier for him to die.

So neither of them gets off the hook.


	46. I'm a vessel between two places

**Note:** Okay, so before we launch into this, the next-to-last chapter of this entire thing, I want to respond to something that I think is worth responding to. It'll be a brief version of something I'll say more of in my giant self-indulgent afterword.

A few people seem to feel like the chapter before this one was regression into more angst. I get that. It was angsty. Here's the thing: horrible things have happened in this fic, and in particular there was a truly horrific instance of sexual assault. That it never became outright penetrative rape doesn't change that. When I wrote it, I realized that doing so placed a particular responsibility on me, and it was to _not rush through or ignore the aftermath,_ which is what so many stories do that makes them completely fail at dealing with sexual assault. If I'm going to respect what I did in my own story, the pain and anger it caused needs to be respected, and in particular _Beth's_ pain and anger needs to be respected. That means it needs to be depicted.

I could have stopped short of all of that. In fact, I originally thought chapter 43 would be my stopping point. Then I decided that this part of Beth and Daryl's journey - their hard road toward recovery - deserved its own place.

And now my part of that journey is almost over. ❤️

* * *

 **Chapter 46: I'm a vessel between two places I've never been**

 _The light is no mystery, the mystery is that there is something to keep the light from passing through._ \- Richard Siken

* * *

He wondered how he would know he was getting better. As it turns out, his opinion on the matter changes from day to day.

He's heard the phrase before: _he has his good days._ But in reference to the elderly, the seriously infirm, people in the process of losing their grip on the world and drifting away entirely. It takes him far too long to realize that in some ways that's exactly what he's become. He's not on his way out - or most days he's fairly certain of that. He's not losing the world, or the people around him, or himself. But since he woke up in that fucking hospital bed, his grip has been tenuous. Some days it's almost slipped. Some days he very nearly _has_ lost it.

Some days he's hanging on and it's not even that difficult.

He's always had his good days. And his bad.

The primary change he begins to discern is that the bad days - slowly - aren't quite as bad. The irritability in the place of the rage becomes a more regular thing. He's not so much crushingly desperate or immobilized by the heavy grayness as he is just… _Down_ is the best word he can think of. He's sinking but not quite as deep, and he isn't down there for quite as long.

His hands: better. Notices when he's doing it, when it's especially bad - when he's freaking out, when he's thinking too damn much, even when he's _bored_. Does the breathing thing. Spreads them out on his knees or on a table. _Looks_ at them, every line and crease and callus, every scab and raw place, every scar. So many scars now, bands of shiny gray-pink tissue. Hard slashes of it on the insides of his forearms. His wrists.

He looks at them and he doesn't blink.

When it gets so bad he can't handle it, Rick sitting with him, or Carol, or once or twice Michonne even if it's always a little more difficult to let her get that close to him, and holding his hands. Interweaving fingers. Warm solidity - they're holding him in place. They're anchoring him, keeping him from flinging himself off into a void. He bows his head and closes his eyes and he imagines it must look like they're praying together.

Maybe it's not really that far off.

* * *

At some point he doesn't want to stay in or near the house anymore.

So he doesn't.

When he shows up at Aaron's door, hands stuffed in his pockets and his head down with a pair of sunglasses shading his eyes, Aaron barely raises a brow at him. Barely says anything. Smiles at him - that patented Aaron Smile that, since the beginning, has made him far less violently angry than it probably would have on almost any other face. This time there's no real trace of anger at all. He just feels weird. The whole thing feels weird. He came here because it's the one place outside the house - besides the yard - where he truly feels like he can go and not want to rip himself out of his own damn skin.

Until he gets into the actual garage, and then he wants to be just about anywhere else in the fucking world.

He freezes a few feet from the door back into the house, sunglasses loose in his hand as he stares at the wall. He can feel Aaron's presence behind him, and the weight of growing concern. He's virtually certain that some things ended up on the floor that night, but if so, Aaron came in and tidied up. He would. He would do that and not bat an eye.

He would do that and have no idea that he's tidying up a crime scene.

Shit, this was such a huge fucking mistake. And he can't tell Aaron why. Can't run. Can't do anything but stare.

He remembers how delicate her throat felt under his hand. How easy it would be, he thought then, to simply crush it.

He can't throw up, either. Because if he does, that's going to be even harder to explain than sprinting for the door.

Touch on his shoulder. He twitches but he doesn't whirl, doesn't snap or snarl like he might have done, and the touch is instantly withdrawn. He stands there, waiting for the rigidity to bleed out of him, and breathes. Like she taught him.

In. Out. One-two-three.

"You okay?"

Grunt. As grunts go, he guesses it sounds pretty normal.

"Alright." Aaron doesn't sound totally convinced, but he also doesn't seem inclined to push, and the scuffle of his shoe on the concrete indicates retreat. "I'll be in the house. Yell if you need something."

Another grunt. Sure. What could he possibly _need,_ though? What does that even mean?

Aaron is gone. He's alone.

He stands there for another few seconds, then lurches his repulsive body into motion. He touches the panel that opens the garage door and blinks at the sunlight as it streams in through the widening gap as the door rumbles upward. He could put the glasses back on - probably should - but he doesn't. It's not about some kind of punishment. It's not that at all.

He needs to see this, and he needs to see it with nothing between him and what he's done.

There's nothing to indicate where it was, that empty patch of wall. But he knows exactly where. He knows and he slowly sinks down onto the floor and folds his legs and gazes at it, motionless, hands loose in his lap. It's not the most violent thing he's ever done, except it is. It's not the cruelest thing he's ever done, except it is. It's not the worst thing he's ever done, except yes: it is. It was the apex, the point of breakage. It was a point of no return. Pinning her up against that fucking wall and getting as far as he did - and he knows that if she hadn't stopped him…

If she hadn't stopped him, he wouldn't be sitting here now. He wouldn't have put the gun in her hand later. He wouldn't have been too weak to do it himself. If she hadn't stopped him, he would have found the strength, in the ruined aftermath, to feed himself that bullet. There is not one iota of a doubt in his mind. He wouldn't have waited for her to pass judgment on him. He would have been his own judge, his jury, his executioner.

She didn't just save herself. She saved his life twice that night.

And what for?

Something soft and warm nudges his arm, the back of his hand, and he jumps slightly and looks down. Wide green eyes meeting his, blinking slowly. Sun on glossy fur, and that enigmatic smile only felines possess. It takes him a few seconds but he recognizes and recalls: OC come to see him - come after what he did, after everything, unafraid of him. Sitting in front of him and gazing up at him in sleek expectation.

Apparently she's forgiven him too.

He's cautious when he extends his hand, but he's not afraid either, and after she gives him a sniffing once-over she butts her head against his palm. He hesitates only a few seconds more and then strokes her, runs his fingers from the top of her skull all the way down to the base of her tail, and she arches in pure sensual delight and flops onto her side, rubbing herself against his knee. Bemused - mostly at a loss - he continues petting her, feeling the rumble of her fantastically loud purr vibrating up the bones of his arm and into his chest.

Yes, she's delicate too. Yes, part of him is increasingly fixated on how easy it would be to snap those delicate little bones. Part of him is constructing the fantasy of doing so, tortuously assembling the details - screeches and screams, her frantic struggling, claws digging weakly into the flesh of his arm as he slaughters her with his bare hands.

They're just thoughts. They don't mean he has to do it. They don't mean he will. They can't hurt him. They can't hurt anyone else.

He looks away from the wall and at the low hulk of the bike under the tarp. He looks at it for a long time.

 _I don't know what to do._

Yes, he does. He absolutely does. At least for now, a warm little cat dozing against his thigh, he knows enough.

 _Get back to work._

* * *

It's not like he's going to get it running tonight. But eventually he can. He's sure he can. It doesn't take any self-convincing; he sees it almost immediately. It won't even be that hard. He can probably do it in a week or so of work - could do it sooner if he wasn't contending with the headaches but he guesses that focusing too hard for too long on one thing is running a bit of a risk. Prudence is indicated, as is a healthy respect for his own limitations.

Fuck, he's being so _practical,_ where the hell did this come from?

He wonders at his own previous doubts. He looks back on them and he gets it, he knows why he felt that way and why he was so frightened. The fear is still there. But it's as if he was blinding himself, or completely unable - or unwilling - to see what was right in front of him.

What he can do.

He only realizes it's getting on to early evening when he's abruptly aware of the gentle throbbing behind his left eye, and he raises his head and gazes out at the long shadows and red-gold light of the setting sun. He's been here for hours, and he completely lost the time.

Straightening up and wiping his greasy hands on a rag, glancing down at OC sprawled in a patch of that deep sunlight, he thinks that he's happy to let that time go. Might be happy to lose more of it to this thing. Because yeah, he's going to be sorry later when the storm rolls through in earnest, but he looks at this thing - this thing that he's _fixing_ \- and he believes it's worth it. The discomfort. The pain. Stretching himself, damaging those muscle fibers just enough so they heal up stronger.

Quiet sound. Creak, footstep. He turns and there's Aaron standing in the doorway again, arms crossed, and this time his smile is very small and warm in a way that isn't altogether familiar.

Yet another grunt. Something halfway to a scowl - but he doesn't mean it, he really and truly doesn't, and Aaron will know that.

Here's the thing: he has his good days and his bad days, and sometimes they're the exact same goddamn day.

"What?"

Aaron shakes his head. "Nothing. It's just good to have you back, is all." He inclines his head toward the interior of the house, that smile still playing around his mouth. "Why don't you come in, wash up. Dinner's almost ready."

He looks at Aaron for a few seconds, then breathes a laugh and ducks his head. The scowl is twisting itself into something perilously close to a smile.

Yeah. All right.

The spaghetti was pretty serious that one time, after all.

* * *

He's with her, inside her, and it's how it was supposed to be.

Not how it _was_. It's not drenched in grief and pain, she's not tight and desperate, and the air isn't thick with his broken whimpers and sobs. She isn't looking up and seeing him half cast in hellish light, half lost in the world of his nightmares, baring his sharp teeth and fucking his madness into her. She's reaching down like she did and taking hold of him, spreading herself wide as she guides him in, gasping when he slowly enters her and the head of his cock presses her cunt open. She's so _hot,_ burning under the thin membrane of her skin, but it's a heavy, sweet burn and it feels so good. He feels so _good_ , braced over her and lowering his head, tipping his forehead down against hers as he withdraws and pushes back in, starting to find a rhythm. Sighing, running a hand down her side and sliding it under her back, shifting her so he can fuck her deeper, and it's all she wants.

No hellish light. No moonlight, either. Dawn light, and warm, casting him in pale gold as he moves and she hooks her legs over his hips to move with him, clutching at his shoulders. He's still so thin, so scarred, but with a strange and partially removed clarity she can see that he's healing. Small pitted mark in his brow, nothing more than the scar it should have been.

She tangles her fingers in his hair, rocks in time with his thrusts, kisses her moans into him and feels him smile against her mouth as he strokes her tongue with his. And she's gasping _harder, Daryl, oh God please_ and he's obliging, scraping his teeth gently along her jaw as he shifts again and lifts himself, gets his knees more firmly under him. He grips her by the waist and fucks her in long, hard rolls of his body as she bites the heel of her palm to muffle her little whines.

He loves her. He doesn't have to say it. He's _showing_ her, showing her every second he's in her like this, showing her every time he ripples pleasure through her body and makes her breath flutter like a startled bird. _This_ is how it was supposed to be, not fucking her like he's trying to give her some kind of final goodbye but like he never wants to say goodbye again.

If they're _making love_ now, it's as brilliant as the sun streaming in through the window.

She's so close and she doesn't want to wait, knows _he_ wouldn't want her to. She's pushing him back with a hand in the center of her chest as she reaches down between them and rubs her clumsy fingers over her clit, and of course he knows what she's doing and he fucks her even harder, grunting with the force of it and groaning _fuck,_ yeah- _yeah, c'mon, Beth, do it, I wanna see it, Christ you're so fuckin' beautiful-_

She snaps herself upward and doesn't bother muffling it now - she _comes,_ comes harder than she thinks she ever has, comes so wet all over his cock and her fingers and keeps going, crying his name, begging him to follow her.

He does. He shouts and convulses and fills her with heat, and the light drowns them both.

* * *

Light in her eyes.

But she's alone. Blinking into the dawn, she's alone and damp with sweat, the sheets tangled around her, gasping as she drifts back down. Somehow so empty.

She's never come in a dream. Not that she can recall.

Warm. Buzzing faintly, like all her limbs have been asleep and are only now stretching and waking. She feels soft around the edges, smoothed out, calm in a way she's not sure she's ever been. She wanted him to fuck her and he did, and it was so sweet, and the nightmares left her alone.

All at once she's aware of something sticky between her thighs and she feels for it beneath the waistband of her shorts, drawing in a sharp breath - remembering. Him _filling_ her, buried in her, joining her wet as he spilled his come into her, and what she thought after and what she _refused_ to think because she simply couldn't. Not that. Not in the midst of the hell they were dragging themselves and each other through.

Fingers between her legs, coating them in whatever it is, pulling her hand back out and raising it, examining. Maybe just how hard she came. Maybe-

Red. Thick red smeared in globules and streaks, strands between her fingers as she separates them.

She stares at it until she understands what it means. That he didn't. That she isn't. Then she turns onto her side, closing her bloody hand into a fist and tucking it against her chest, and silently she weeps into the sunrise.

* * *

She knows him by sight. But he doesn't know her.

He wants to sit still, but he can't, and he knows that if he made a real effort to force himself, he wouldn't be able to help it: he would go to town on his fingers, and that wouldn't exactly fill Deanna with confidence in him. So he selects the lesser of two evils and he roams a bit, paces, scans around her living room - even more aggressively _tasteful_ than Rick's in a way that frankly makes his skin crawl, and feels sure that he must resemble an uneasy feral animal who doesn't appreciate being inside.

Outdoor cat. Him and OC, two of a kind.

"You didn't exactly make the best first impression," she says dryly from her seat on the couch. She's been watching him closely since he walked through the door. He doesn't at all blame her. "Or the second."

He shrugs, looking away. No, he didn't. He wouldn't even consider arguing with that. In fact, he's never been especially smooth with first impressions. He's guessing he's never made a genuinely good one. Sure as hell didn't make one with Rick.

Yet that turned out okay. Mostly.

Make eye contact with her. At some point he has to. If he doesn't he won't just look uneasy and feral; he'll look _furtive,_ untrustworthy, and that won't help anything and will probably hurt everything.

He doesn't want to hurt. He wants to help.

"Denise says you're making good progress," she says, voice quiet and faintly rough. It's not an unpleasant voice, and he doesn't dislike it. About her, he's not sure yet. "That you're making a real effort. Your own people back that up, though obviously they've got a bit of a bias in your favor."

Grunt. He's not sure what to say to that. Not sure he's expected to say anything. He's determined not to overthink this; doing so only increases the likelihood that he'll fuck something up, freak her out. Make her mind up for her.

 _Breathe._

"Aaron too, which honestly means the most to me. Denise's opinion is the professional one, but…" She crosses her legs and links her hands over her top knee. Tasteful brown slacks. "Aaron is the one we send out there to determine things like this. Who should be here. Who shouldn't. If he speaks for you, I'm inclined to listen to him."

"Beth told me."

He doesn't mean to speak, but seconds after he does, he's pretty certain that he doesn't need to worry about that. Doesn't need to wish he could take it back. "That he found 'em," he adds. "When they were on the road. Brought 'em in."

She actually gives him a small smile. "Yes. He did. And to be honest, more than once I've wondered if he made a mistake there, but really… I think he was right. The right thing isn't always the easiest one, I guess."

He looks at her for a couple of seconds, grunts again. Bends over the coffee table and reaches into a dish full of polished pebbles. No purpose that he can see other than decorative, but when he picks one of them up and turns it over in his hand, its cool smoothness is soothing.

"You don't talk much, do you?"

He straightens up. "Could be I don't got a lot to say."

The corner of her mouth quirks. "Which means I'm pretty much left in the dark about what's going on in your head."

"Yeah, well." He huffs a laugh, shakes that head she's wondering about. "Dunno if you want that anyway."

"No?"

"Nah. No fun in here."

"No. I suppose it wouldn't be."

He halts in mid-pace and glances up at her again, stone rolling against his fingers and his palm - warming as it soaks up his body heat. She's impassive, with her hard eyes and the equally hard set of her mouth. Her walls are high and sturdy and devoid of cracks, and he can't see through or over. Can't discern what she's feeling at all except for her dry interest. _Careful_ interest. He does get the sense that she's reserving judgment, at least for the moment. He can respect that.

"Daryl, do you want to be here?"

Once he would have hesitated. Hesitated for a long time, probably. Uncertain - uneasy and feral. Outdoor cat. Here behind the walls and climbing them, clawing at them, chewing his paws off to escape. Pacing like he is now with his eyes darting everywhere, and God forbid he lets anyone get too close.

But that's what was. Not what is. Not what might be.

"Yeah."

"You'll work with me? To make sure you can stay?"

He closes his hand around the stone. From cool and smooth to warm and smooth. A transition in state, though the form remains the same. And the things that alter that form - he never took a geology course in his life, barely recalls any of his science classes in school, but he knows things. He's broken, but he's not stupid. He knows how the process works.

Pressure, and time. Patience.

He gives her his own small smile. Minuscule. It doesn't need to be large. It just needs to be there.

"I'll try."

* * *

He's walking down Deanna's steps, deliberating between heading for Aaron and Eric's place or heading for home, and there she is.

He pauses. Doesn't freeze, exactly, but he doesn't move, and he thinks of a deer in a stand of trees, ears pricked. Not afraid, but alert. She doesn't see him yet. She's coming from the direction of the clinic, and it doesn't take a lot of detective work to draw a conclusion about where she was and what she was likely doing.

They both have their own work to get to.

She turns her head. Meets his eyes, also pauses. Somehow he's managed to avoid catching even a glimpse of her in her comings and goings across the street. He said he shouldn't see her for a while, and this is the first time he truly has, outside of his own overly vivid imagination.

He could go to her now. Walk right up to her and say hello. See what she says. See if she wants to say anything at all, or if she merely shakes her head and turns and walks away.

But a voice in the back of his mind whispers _Not yet._

 _Soon._

She's beautiful. She's even more beautiful than he remembers, all that cornsilk hair pulled back behind her head and flowing over one shoulder, shining in the sun - and bizarrely clear even at a distance, the even curves of a braid nestled in those gathered strands. Her frame, strong and graceful and delicate as a cat's, the slight curves enclosed by her tight jeans. The muscles of her bare arms. The scars slashed across her face, the memory of them under his thumb.

He can want her. He can want to be with her. He can let himself feel it. It's okay.

He gives her a single nod. After a few seconds, she returns it. Her sweet lips curl into a smile.

She keeps walking.

He watches her go. They're headed in roughly the same direction, or they would be, even if he went to Aaron's instead of home. It would feel strange to follow her, even if he kept his distance, and he's positive it wouldn't be comfortable for her. He's seen her, yes. Doesn't mean there should be more than that.

But he's _seen_ her. And it hurts, yes - it's tying the contents of his chest into dense knots, nearly painful enough to force a whimper out of him, flooding a terribly desperate longing into his veins - but he bore it, and it wasn't all pain. It's her warmth inside him, her light, and the ghosts of her soft hands on his face and in his hair - soft with him, even if they're almost as rough as his.

They won't be ghosts forever.

He waits a little longer, a short while after she's disappeared from his view, and then slides on his sunglasses and starts walking. He feels good now. He's all right.

She was worth it. She was so much more than worth it.

So is he.


	47. epilogue

**epilogue**

 _But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known._

 _And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love._ \- 1 Corinthians: 8-13

* * *

It's a soft red-violet twilight in early summer when he comes back to her.

She took an evening shift today. She used to prefer the mornings, but increasingly the evenings are where she feels most at home. The gates face the south, and watching the sun sink toward the horizon on her right feels somehow fundamentally different from watching it rise on her left. The deeper hue, the angle of the shadows, the temperature - a richer, lazier warmth. There's something soothing about it, something gentler. Perhaps it has to do with endings and how they're so unlike beginnings, how they can be melancholy but also so satisfying, and how if you're very lucky indeed you can let yourself go into them and find a kind of peace.

It _is_ peaceful. Even with the growls and hisses from a buildup of walkers on the eastern side of the wall, which someone is going to have to go out and deal with tomorrow. She sits with her rifle on her knees and tips her head back and watches the first few stars emerging in blue deepening to pitch.

It's clear and the moon is almost new. The stars will be brilliant, the pale spill of the Milky Way, here and there a bright streak as a wayward meteor strikes the atmosphere and burns. It occurs to her now, for some reason she can't identify and doesn't much care to, that he talked a lot about the light of the moon but never really about the stars. Never really about the more distant light, so far away that its sources might be and in fact probably are long dead. They're all constantly touched by ghosts. They're surrounded on all sides.

The ghosts are beautiful. The night would be so dark without them.

Abruptly from her left come the creaks and rattles of someone climbing the ladder up to her, and while she jumps a little, she instantly knows who it is. She sensed - though she's only truly realizing it now - that it would be today, that everything was finally aligned and he was ready and so was she. The work isn't done and there's a long way to go, probably for both of them, but this morning she woke up and she _wanted to see him_ in a way she hasn't before. Didn't need to, but wanted to, and there was something about the simple fact of the desire itself that felt good.

To miss someone that way, without it being choked by pain.

Now here he is; she glances over and sees him topping the ladder, his movements slowing and growing hesitant as he lifts his head and meets her eyes.

He's not entirely sure that he's allowed to do this. He's prepared for her to tell him he has to go.

She scoots over and pats the space beside her. He hangs back for a few seconds longer, looking from her to the place she made for him, and then steps up onto the platform and settles beside her with his legs dangling like hers. He's not looking at her now - he's focused outward on those same ruined houses he stared at the last time he was here with her, and she takes the opportunity to study him as surreptitiously as she can.

He looks good. Hair still long and unkempt, still hanging in his eyes - she guesses it'll remain in that state no matter how much he heals - and his body still thin and _worn_ in a way she can't place in any single aspect, as if his suffering has shaped him in the way wire shapes a Bonsai tree. The lines in his face are still deeper than they've ever been, and when she drops her gaze to where his scarred hands rest on his lap, she spots a couple of places where the cuticles have been freshly stripped raw.

But he looks good. He looks _there._ Present and real within himself. Even if he's not looking at her, she can see that his focus is keen. He's not half submerged in his own dark water. He's thin, sure, but he's less thin than he was. He's less pale. Less drained. Less empty.

He's putting himself gradually back together. What remains of him. And perhaps he's replacing the lost pieces with something new.

"Hi," she says softly, and he turns his head, peers at her through the ragged curtain of his hair.

He's scared. Not very, but he is. Instantly she gets it: even invited to sit beside her, he's uncertain regarding whether or not he's overstepping some line. Whether or not she actually wants him here. Whether or not he's fucking this up, possibly the most important thing in the world to him at this moment.

The possibility of a first step. A beginning. A tiny one, so delicate, a cautious little dawn in the midst of a full-bellied, careless evening.

 _All that might be._

She doesn't say anything. She reaches over and ignores the way he stiffens when she covers his hand with hers.

Stiffens - but then almost immediately relaxes. More than relaxes: he's run through with relief, and she doesn't miss the breath that escapes him. The breath he was holding onto.

The truth is that she's not sure what to say. But there's what she said when she came to him on the back porch, when she first _saw_ him as the return of what she lost, a man who could still come back, and she forgot herself and merely took what she had been dragging around for months and made it into words and gave them to him.

"I missed you," she whispers, and he sighs again - deeper - and turns his hand beneath hers, threading their fingers. Squeezing.

Strong.

He doesn't say anything. But he doesn't have to. Very possibly he can't anyway. She's more than content to let the quiet be, let the birds and the crickets and the distant moans of the walkers fill it for the two of them. She doesn't need him to speak in order to be sure of what this means. They're here.

They made it.

But after a little while she does speak - still very soft, and really it's not a question she even requires an answer for, because she can see him for herself and she knows him well enough to draw her own conclusions. It comes regardless, and she doesn't want to take it back.

"How're you doin'?"

He doesn't answer right away, gazing down at their joined hands on his thigh. She doesn't push him. She's thinking of something Denise told her on a bad day, about time and about _how you're doing_ and about how you need to think about it in order to keep from only making yourself crazier.

 _You need to let tomorrow go. Tomorrow is tomorrow. It doesn't exist yet. The past doesn't either, right? It's gone, and you can't change it - you said that too. You can't make a different choice. The only thing you have any control over is_ now _. The only time you know anything is_ now. _The only place you're real at all is_ now. _So focus on what's happening right now,_ today, _and deal with everything else as it comes. Leave all those other days alone. The only day that matters is this one._

 _You already know that. You have to, or you'd probably have been dead a long time ago._

 _This is how we stay alive._

Sitting with this man she loves and who loves her, hand in his, and yes: he's alive. He's broken and sick and maybe he always will be, in one way or another, but that's okay. It's not like she has her shit together either.

They're nuts. But maybe they can make it work.

It's worth trying.

He raises his head. She watches as he turns his face to the setting sun, eyes closed. A smile is playing around the corners of his mouth, and the memory comes to her of him standing with his hands raised to catch the sparks raining down on him, bathed in firelight.

Smiling that beautiful smile.

"Today I'm alright," he murmurs, and squeezes her hand again. He opens his eyes and looks at her, and they're not dark. They're clear and bright, and no, he's not who he was. What she sees now is not the man she saw die.

But it's more than enough.

"Today I'm better."

 _-the end-_


	48. afterword

**afterword (there's no way I could ever leave)**

Oh, hey. You made it.

There have been fics where I congratulated and thanked people for sticking with me to the end, but I think this might honestly be the first fic where I feel like some kind of prize should be awarded, because Jesus effing _Christ._

This thing, like most of the things I write, got completely out of hand. In a good way, I think, and it's also accurate to say that I went into it pretty much expecting it to get out of hand - I do occasionally learn from experience - and made psychological room for it to do so. I said at the beginning that I wanted to do another _Safe Up Here With You,_ and in many ways I have - I think this fic and that one would probably benefit from being read together as a matched pair - but in many ways this also ended up being quite different, and not just because it ended up being well over twice as long.

As happens very commonly with me, this whole preposterous mess had its inception in a song - "Right Where it Belongs" by Nine Inch Nails. What led up to it, as far as I can recall, was repeated listenings of the NIN album _Still_ (I will never get over how it's called that) and noting that most of the songs on that album - and in fact a huge number of NIN songs in general - fit the angstier side of Beth and Daryl's relationship, and specifically the worst of Daryl's psyche. Despair, doubt, hopelessness, worthlessness, violence, rage, and desperate love - I had written about those things before, but I wanted to go for their throats in a way I hadn't. I wanted to really make an effort to write the darkest thing I reasonably could. I wanted to tread that edge I've talked about many times before, where I'm trying to hurt a reader but not so badly that they have to leave. I wanted to get people to the point the best horror films get you to: clutching a pillow and hiding behind it at intervals, almost unable to keep watching but completely incapable of looking away.

(Seems like at least with some of you, I've done that. I can't tell you how gratifying that is.)

I wanted, in other words, to be unapologetically brutal and cruel. But that "reasonable" requirement up there was important. I've referred to this multiple times as my "Dead Dove fic", and it sort of is in that I'm incorporating some really problematic tropes without interrogating them the way I ought to be, but it also isn't, because I didn't end up merely wallowing in trash. I ended up trying to do what I always do when I tackle things like this: tell a story about a journey into darkness in order to climb back into light. I always envisioned this as Daryl's (and Beth's) Inferno, but the Divine Comedy requires a Purgatorio and a Paradiso in order to be complete. We spent most of our time in Hell, but I didn't want to end it there.

Among other things, that's boring.

I'll make a confession: for the first few chapters I was legitimately uncertain regarding whether Daryl would come out of this alive, or whether Beth would make it either. When I said I couldn't promise a happy ending, I wasn't just jerking people around; I genuinely couldn't promise anything, because I wasn't sure. It didn't take long for me to narrow things down to a single ending, but when I went into this I didn't know, and that made things very interesting, as well as shaping the first few chapters in some important ways.

But it would have been too easy to end things in suicide or a mercy-killing or a combination of the two (or murder). It would have felt cheap to me, almost as cheap as an ending where everything is happy and fine and beautiful and nothing hurts. Something I say over and over is that I don't do hopeless endings. I think a mercy-killing/suicide ending isn't necessarily hopeless, and there was a period where I thought the climactic scene in the woods might end that way, but it wouldn't have felt right even then.

Healing is more difficult. And writing it happening after so much pain and horror, and making that writing work, was the challenge I wanted.

I loved how so few people saw that coming. It made me so pleased. (It also made me wonder at what point people are going to start trusting me.)

Another thing that kept it from being merely a Dead Dove fic was the fact that pretty early on, I realized that despite my making use of trauma and mental illness in a way that's incredibly uncomfortable and problematic, I also wanted to attempt to treat those things with some degree of respect, and tell a meaningful story about them.

I don't have a traumatic brain injury, but I am mentally ill, and specifically I deal with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as well as depression and anxiety. I experience much milder versions of a huge number of the things Daryl does here, in particular compulsive self-harm and violent intrusive thoughts. I wanted to tell a horror story that disgusted and horrified me, which is why I incorporated those things (I also think there's some canon support for Daryl having a touch of dermatillomania; he often gnaws/chews/picks at his fingers, notably when he's tense). Especially the violent intrusive thoughts; one of the things that terrifies me most about those is the idea that I might someday act on them and hurt someone or myself. Very few people with those thoughts ever do, so objectively I know that I'm probably fine, but the idea of doing so is still horrible, and is in itself intrusive.

So in some ways this also became my catharsis. It seems like it became that for a lot of people.

I'm no longer sure where the idea of Daryl being the one to get shot at Grady came from. I think in part it was probably just because I hadn't ever heard of it being done before, and the idea presented some fantastic possibilities for dealing with Beth's character just as much as Daryl's. Beth in psychological pain has been written about plenty of times, but I don't think Beth in this kind of pain - _Daryl's_ kind of pain - has really been done a whole lot. I tend to leap at the chance to do something different, or least something conventional in a different way, so here we are.

Another thing that was an absolute joy and that I didn't at all see coming was the exploration of the relationship between characters that went outside Beth and Daryl's (and I got to explore a profoundly platonic side of that one as well as a romantic side, which I loved). Relationships that we don't actually see enough of on the show but which I think would have to be incredibly important in a situation like this. Especially the relationship between Carol and Beth - when I write those scenes I always feel like I'm giving a giant double middle finger to both the Carol people who hate Beth and the Beth people who hate Carol, which I enjoy - and the relationship between Beth and Rick, which fascinates me. Only gradually did I come to understand how painfully intimate - and just plain painful - that relationship would have to be, with Beth's guilt over the conviction that she was responsible for Daryl's death and Rick's guilt over the prospect of losing yet another brother, and their mutual love for this man who they lost and then recovered in just about the worst state possible.

Their love and anger brought something else to the fore, something I've written about before now - especially when it comes to Daryl and Merle - but haven't addressed in quite this way: the way it's possible to love someone and still feel profoundly negative emotions toward them. To love someone and also _hate_ them. That's difficult because it's not how we ever write Daryl and Beth, but it's something else I've done before, specifically in _Safe Up Here With You_ when Daryl unleashes all his rage over Beth's role in arguably causing her own death.

Which brings me to what's probably the single most difficult thing I did here, which was the single biggest factor in determining how the ending proceeded: Daryl's sexual assault of Beth.

This is yet _another_ thing I did in _Safe Up Here With You,_ in a much less violent way. There it was confined to fondling when Beth was in no position to give any kind of consent. Here I went a lot further, and a significant degree of why I did was that I wanted to see if I could, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity.

I've said on our fandom podcast that I regard Daryl sexually assaulting Beth as just about impossible to write in a way that works, and I still think that's true. It's true because of who Daryl _is,_ how he regards predation of the vulnerable as the greatest crime someone can commit, how enraged we've seen him get over sexual violence, how fiercely he protects the people he cares for, and - probably most of all - his own sexuality, which we've never seen any evidence is aggressive (we have yet to see any evidence that he feels any real sexual desire for anyone at all). It's just not something he would ever ever _ever_ do.

Unless.

The other thing I said about Daryl doing something like that was that I believed it might be possible to write it and have it be in-character if he was put in an unfathomably horrible position, where his context itself would push him in directions he would otherwise never go. So I did something very similar to what I did in _Safe Up Here With You:_ I put him in close quarters with someone for whom he feels incredibly intense and deeply mixed emotions (and someone who isn't actually a whole lot more mentally functional than he is), and I wrote his sexuality as I imagine it might be, which is extremely immature and as powerful, when awakened by this person, as immature sexuality tends to be.

And it's awakening in such a fucked up way. It won't be healthy. It won't be safe. Daryl is possessive of Beth, to the point of behaving like a stalker. He has violent sexually-edged fantasies about her, and then violent fantasies that are explicitly sexual in nature (he has fantasies about literal necrophilia; I made those somewhat gauzy-lensed, in part because I felt like it actually increased the horror of them, but yeah).

So all of that led up to one of the most horrific things I've ever written. And I think - I hope you felt - that it worked.

But it made me realize something about the ending, which was responsible for making it about 10k words longer than I thought it would be: in order to keep it from being a mere plot point, I needed to show how Beth, and to a lesser degree Daryl, was coping with it and healing from it. I _had_ to, because maybe this is kind of a Dead Dove fic and maybe I'm being problematic with my tropes, but I couldn't have respected myself or this story if I brushed off attempted rape. This meant that I had to continue past where I originally intended and depict at least some of the process of working through everything that had happened. It would have felt wrong to me to jump through all that to the epilogue. It would have felt like I was magic-wanding all of that pain and anger away.

So we dipped back into angst a little. But I didn't feel that it was regressive angst, or angst for the sake of angst. I meant for it to be a recognition that recovery is sometimes painful - _mostly_ painful, in fact, depending on what you're recovering from - and that the steps forward are frequently slow, interspersed with some steps back. A journey up from a depth this low isn't going to be an easy one if it's going to be true.

But they made it.

And here we find ourselves at the end of the second longest thing (so far; I think Howl will surpass it by a good bit) that I've ever written in this fandom. It's become such a personal story for me, and one of which I'm so proud. It's not perfect, but no story ever is, and I'm emerging from it satisfied with how it was told.

I come to the end of a story with two interrelated goals in mind: to have done right by the story, and to have done right by everyone who accompanied me. I think I have to thank you especially much in this case, because holy lord it was not an easy ride, and because you trusted me and because you cared. Thank you so, so much. It means the world to me.

A few things before I say goodbye to you for now: As with _I'll Be Yours For a Song_ and _Safe Up Here With You,_ I'll be making a paperback version of this. I line edit all my stuff pretty carefully, so it probably won't be available for a while, but it'll happen. I'll also be releasing what I think of as the "soundtrack" for this, because as usual with me, music was the driving force for its writing as well as its inception.

And finally, I have a , and if you want to help support this kind of work and make it easier for me to keep doing it, please consider tossing a buck or two in my hat. I would do this stuff regardless, because I love it beyond belief, but it's still hugely appreciated.

Thank you again. I'll see you out there on the road, and I can't wait to find out what the next journey will bring.

12/10/15 - 7/7/16


End file.
